Given all that has transpired in the past few weeks, it might be hard to remember that Donald Trump and Marco Rubio once represented near-opposite poles of foreign policy.
In the narrative of the 2016 GOP presidential primary, Rubio, then a senator from Florida, was seen as the last hope of the party’s neoconservative establishment against Trump’s presumed isolationism. It would have been hard to imagine a Trump administration in which Rubio would become the only person in history other than Henry Kissinger to fill the jobs of both the secretary of state and national security adviser. Add to that, he is also the acting archivist of the United States.
Since the Jan. 3 military operation that seized Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro — which was quickly followed by talk of the U.S. taking over strategically important Greenland — a word has been showing up frequently in commentary: “neocon.”
“Mr. Trump is pursuing the Bush freedom agenda, at least in the Western Hemisphere,” the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board posited, as it cheered the Venezuela action. “Are we all neocons now?”
A headline on the website Puck christened the president “Neocon Don.”
Former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia), continuing her transition from one of the president’s most devoted acolytes to a harsh critic, accused Trump of launching “neocon wars.” Greene added: “This is what many in MAGA thought they voted to end. Boy were we wrong.”
But is President Trump’s brand of militarism really a resurrection of neoconservatism, which Candidate Trump blamed for the “endless wars” that he promised to end?
“Trump has always had this side of him. It’s this kind of blustering intimidation. He likes demonstrative uses of military power to intimidate people,” said Eric Edelman, who served as undersecretary of defense for policy in the George W. Bush administration and is a former ambassador to Finland and Turkey.
To call that “neocon,” Edelman added, is “a term of abuse, not of analysis.”
Indeed, as attractive as it has been for some to attach the label to Trump, it could also be argued that he represents the movement’s epitaph.
Missing from Trump’s hawkishness is the idealism that was integral to neoconservatism. As Bush put it in his second inaugural address: “It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”
In Venezuela, Maduro was removed but his regime — deemed illegitimately elected by the U.S. and most of its allies — was left in place and the opposition sidelined. With Maduro’s vice president Delcy Rodriguez being sworn in as interim president, repression has intensified.
Nor has Trump expressed urgency for new elections in Venezuela. “They couldn’t have an election,” he said in an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News. “They wouldn’t even know how to have an election right now. The country’s become Third World, and they wouldn’t know how to have an election right now.”
In the meantime, Trump has said the United States will “run” Venezuela with a declared intention to take control of its vast oil reserves.
And while the means employed under the banner of neoconservatism often contradicted its goals, the movement was also built on the idea of rules-based international alliances. Trump’s renewed interest in taking over Greenland, which is a semiautonomous territory of Denmark, has sent a shock wave through NATO partners.
In an interview with Jake Tapper on CNN, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller declared that the United States is ready to seize Greenland by force if necessary. “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” Miller said. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
In a separate display of aggressiveness, Trump has warned the Iranian regime against a crackdown on protests that are taking place there. “If Iran [shoots] and violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue. We are locked and loaded and ready to go,” he wrote Jan. 2 on social media.
That Rubio would sign on as Trump’s partner in all of this has dismayed some of the foreign policy establishment figures who supported him in 2016, and some have branded it shape-shifting opportunism.
“What you’re really tracing is the arc of Donald Trump’s total domination and remaking of the Republican Party in his own image, and Marco Rubio’s politically very shrewd accommodation to that reality and transformation into a willing instrument,” said Edelman, who was among the prominent establishment figures who endorsed Rubio in 2016.
“I’m not sure he ever was a neocon, but whatever that means, he’s long since shed that,” Edelman added. “He hasn’t been there for quite a while, actually.”
Rubio’s selection as secretary of state also raised the ire the MAGA right, where he was viewed as a neocon Trojan horse.
Yet those who know Rubio well insist he went into the second Trump administration comfortable with and fully understanding what would lie ahead.
“The president is the one setting foreign policy and Secretary Rubio understood that very clearly when the president offered him this role, and he eagerly accepted it,” said one person who has worked closely with him, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe Rubio’s thinking and motives.
This person also pointed to Rubio’s own evolution toward a more nationalist and populist view of the world, which aligned with Trump’s. The title of his 2023 book was “Decades of Decadence: How Our Spoiled Elites Blew America’s Inheritance of Liberty, Security, and Prosperity.”
“You can see, certainly in the book but elsewhere, even during the president’s first term, [how] the secretary’s language, rhetoric, posture towards a bunch of foreign policy issues are different than what people perceived of him as from when he was a candidate back in 2015-2016,” the Rubio associate said.
In the early days of Trump’s second administration, Rubio at times has seemed the odd man out. He reportedly clashed with Elon Musk over the closure of the U.S. Agency for International Development by the billionaire’s DOGE cost-cutting operation and Musk’s demand for more firings at the State Department. Photos of him sinking in apparent discomfort into an Oval Office couch as Trump and Vice President JD Vance berated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during a February meeting went viral.
But now the internet memes have turned, along with perceptions of his influence as the number of roles he has been given have expanded. AI-generated images portray Rubio as governor of Greenland, supreme leader of Iran, even starting quarterback for the Green Bay Packers against the Chicago Bears.
On Thursday, Rubio himself joined in, writing on the social media platform X: “I do not normally respond to online rumors but feel the need to do so at this moment I will not be a candidate for the currently vacant HC and GM positions with the Miami Dolphins.”
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