Traditionally, secretaries of state have played a role of great prominence in U.S. administrations. Although they are only fourth in the presidential order of succession, these officials often outshine vice presidents. One need only think of examples such as Henry Kissinger, James A. Baker, Hillary Clinton, or John Kerry to recall how influential and vocal public servants in this office can be.
Against this backdrop, current Secretary of State Marco Rubio cuts a particularly disappointing figure. As President Donald Trump’s second term takes on a clear authoritarian bent and disrupts long-standing U.S. relationships, one might have expected Rubio—who has a record of criticizing Trump and his foreign-policy stances—to be one of the rare “adults in the room,” as experienced officials such as John Kelly and James Mattis were called during Trump’s first term. Analysts sometimes credited these figures with slowing the president down through deliberate debate and reining in his impulsive extremes.
But during his first months in the job, Rubio has instead appeared as a diminished figure and slavish latter-day convert to the Trump worldview—even when it goes strongly against his own extensive record of foreign-policy positions.
One of the first clear signs of this was Rubio’s stupefied demeanor during Trump’s unprecedented public upbraiding of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky when the leader visited the Oval Office in February. As Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance angrily rebuked Zelensky, a sullen-looking Rubio hunched beside Vance, sinking into the couch like a character in the movie Get Out entering the “sunken place.”
Afterward, Rubio rushed to acclaim the outrageous diplomatic behavior that he had passively witnessed. “Thank you @POTUS for standing up for America in a way that no President has ever had the courage to do before. Thank you for putting America First,” he wrote on X. Never mind that as a senator, Rubio was known for his staunch support for Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression.
Rubio’s other failings, if not always as cinematic, have come in rapid succession. In late March, Rubio joined other senior administration figures in embarrassing themselves by turning a cabinet meeting into an exercise in ritualistic praise for Trump, saying:
Mr. President, first of all, I think the American people should be proud that we have a president that’s promoting peace and the end of conflict on this planet. This is a war that’s gone on for three years … that—as you’ve rightly pointed out—would never have happened had you been president. But now it’s here, and it needs to be brought to an end. … And there’s only one leader in the world that’s capable of bringing the two sides to a table. And that’s our president, the president of the United States, President Trump. And that’s what he’s done.
Then, after citing U.S.-mediated talks on Ukraine at the time underway in Saudi Arabia, Rubio commended the progress Trump had made toward peace despite “impediments from other countries and others who maybe have different opinions about how this should go.”
Calling a president the only chance for world peace is rhetoric that flirts with religious adoration. But Rubio’s words about other countries having “different opinions” about Russia’s war in Ukraine are even more worrisome. Most of Washington’s long-standing allies have appropriately identified Moscow as the clear and unprovoked aggressor. Rubio has dishonored himself by pretending otherwise in word salad like this.
Rubio’s abject submission to Trump was further evident at a cabinet meeting this month. In the fulsomeness of his praise—the sort that I have witnessed while covering outright dictatorships in North Korea and Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo)—Rubio’s rhetoric quickly became confused and stumbling.
“Well, Mr. President, one of the most important things I believe you’ll achieve in your presidency is reordering the world in a proper way,” Rubio said, lauding Trump for his global trade war and erratic tariff policies. Rubio credited his boss for breaking with 31 years of U.S. policy that allowed China to “deindustrialize” the United States.
Rubio added:
I want to congratulate you and your team that’s working on that because that has extraordinary geopolitical implications as you see from all of these other countries that are now coming here and wanting to join something that actually makes it just crazy to allow these, I mean basically we lived in a world where Chinese companies can do whatever they want in America.
As secretary of state, Rubio should be more forthcoming about the countries that have been rushing to renegotiate trade ties under the Trump tariff regime. In reality, no new deals have been announced, and there is little sign of breakthroughs in negotiations.
According to former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense Chas Freeman, a Japanese delegation recently left Washington without any substantive progress. “Their experience apparently was they went to talk to the American leadership on [trade], and the American leadership said, ‘What are you offering?’ And the Japanese said, ‘Well, what is it that you want?’ And the Americans could not explain what they wanted,” Freeman said.
Rubio has accumulated a series of related disgraces. As a senator, he praised the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and supported both its development mission and its utility as a source of U.S. soft power. In presiding over USAID’s abrupt dismantlement, though, he has parroted the Trump administration’s claims about the agency’s waste and irrelevance—even as a study published in the medical journal The Lancet estimated that U.S. funding cuts could lead to the preventable deaths of as many as 25 million people around the world from treatable diseases including HIV and tuberculosis.
Other secretaries of state have stoutly defended Foggy Bottom in bureaucratic and budgetary wars against encroachments from the Pentagon and an expanding imperial presidency. Yet Rubio has done nothing to publicly defend the State Department against cuts so severe that they could downsize it by half. And on Tuesday, he announced a sweeping reorganization of the agency to address what he referred to as “decades of bloat.”
One of the most dramatic consequences of the State Department cuts would be a radical downgrading of U.S. relations with Africa, where the United States has long seen growing Chinese economic and political influence as coming at the West’s expense. Numerous African countries would lose U.S. embassies and consulates, and the State Department’s Bureau of African Affairs would be eliminated.
In a similar spirit, Rubio, once a champion of the State Department’s annual human rights reports, has presided over a radical pruning of these documents, which criticize foreign governments for abuses such as limits on expression and assembly, the denial of minority and gender rights, sexual exploitation, restrictions on free and fair elections, and inhumane prison conditions. When NPR recently sought comment on this, the State Department did not respond.
In the United States, Rubio—who once criticized authoritarian regimes for stifling speech—has taken a hard-line stance against free speech rights for foreign students, arguing that those who espouse positions contrary to U.S. policy should not be granted student visas. He has touted the Trump administration’s decision to revoke more than 300 student visas and promised to scrutinize applicants’ backgrounds to weed out the politically undesirable.
Possibly the most shameful of Rubio’s actions, though, is his support for the Trump administration’s deportation of hundreds of people—including the illegally deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia—to a Salvadoran prison widely condemned for its crowding and brutal conditions.
Rubio made his political career in Florida as the son of Cuban migrants who unstintingly criticized human-rights shortcomings in Latin America. Yet he has demonstrated little attachment to freedom of expression or human rights in his current role. Now, he glad-hands with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, a highly authoritarian leader who brags about himself as the “world’s coolest dictator,” calling him a “good friend to the United States.”
Meanwhile, Rubio has expressed surprise that there has been any fuss over the deportations, which are being contested in court over a fundamental lack of due process. “I don’t understand what the confusion is,” he said about Garcia’s case last week.
That remark cements what has been clear since January: Rubio is a lost man and a soulless contortionist who stands for no principle other than serving the man who appointed him.
The post Marco Rubio’s Soulless Crusade appeared first on Foreign Policy.
