As Secretary of State and also national-security adviser, Rubio is, at least in theory, the most powerful American diplomat since Henry Kissinger. But compared with Kissinger, whose crusading interventionism defined a generation of America’s global relationships, Rubio often seems like a support staffer for the President. As Trump lurches from one crisis to another, Rubio—calm, articulate, and capable of projecting a Boy Scout’s earnest charm—justifies his policies, soothes rattled allies, and puts the best face on initiatives that only a few years ago he would have denounced.
In the days after the attack on Venezuela, many observers made the inevitable comparison to Iraq, another oil-rich country where the U.S. toppled a strongman ruler, prompting a years-long quagmire. Rubio insisted in a series of appearances that the situations were not at all the same. On “Face the Nation,” he said, “A lot of people analyze everything that happens in foreign policy through the lens of what happened from 2001 through, you know, 2015 or ’16. . . . This is not the Middle East. And our mission here is very different.”
Since Trump began his second term, his “America First” foreign policy has brought about an epochal change in the country’s place in the world, as the U.S. casts off traditional commitments to pursue its immediate self-interest. The sprawling network of alliances, treaties, and foreign-assistance programs that the U.S. built at the end of the Second World War is being radically altered or simply discarded. Since January, the U.S. has cut tens of billions of dollars in humanitarian and development aid, withdrawn from such landmark agreements as the Paris climate accord, and curtailed reporting on human-rights abuses. Entire government departments have been hollowed out. In their place is a highly personalized approach, largely dependent on the whims of Trump, whose foreign policy reflects a harsher, stingier, and less forgiving country.
Rubio, at fifty-four, is the policy’s unlikely executor. Before joining the Trump Administration, he spent his career advocating for America as the leader of the world’s democracies; the son of Cuban immigrants, he was a champion of aid to impoverished countries. Some observers believe that Rubio is working to provide consistency and balance in a tumultuous Administration. “He’s doing his best to moderate Trump’s worst impulses,” a European foreign minister told me. “He understands the stakes. He’s whispering in Trump’s ear. But he has only so much influence.” Others are less charitable. They believe that Rubio is presiding over the remaking of America as a kind of rogue nation, just as an axis of authoritarian rivals, led by China, rises to challenge the world’s democracies. “Trashing our allies, gutting State and foreign aid, the tariffs—the damage is going to take years to repair, if it can ever be repaired,” Eric Rubin, a retired ambassador who headed the State Department’s diplomatic union, told me. “I hope it ruins his career.”
By most standards, Rubio occupies a privileged post: his desk in the White House is just a few steps from the Oval Office. But it is not the position that he hoped to occupy. In 2016, Rubio ran for President and lost to Trump in the primary. He now serves his former opponent—an unstable leader who regularly traduces institutions that Rubio spent his career supporting. “Ultimately, he has to be a hundred per cent loyal to the President, and when the President zigs and zags Rubio has to zig and zag, too,” a former Western diplomat told me. “He’s had to swallow a lot of shit.”
The election in 2016 is the only one that Rubio has ever lost—an anomaly in a carefully managed ascent. In 1999, he was elected to the Florida House of Representatives, from a largely working-class area of West Miami; though he didn’t live in the district when the seat opened up, he moved there in time to campaign. Just four years later, he announced that he would run for speaker of the House. Florida had recently imposed term limits, and many senior House members were retiring. The leadership was open, and Rubio wanted it.
“I knew it. He’s wearing a scribe.”
Cartoon by Paul Noth
Many people in Florida politics felt that the time was right for a Cuban American speaker, but Rubio faced a difficult issue. For years, public-school teachers in Florida’s cities were paid more than those in rural areas, to compensate for their higher cost of living. A powerful group of legislators, mostly from rural north Florida, wanted salaries equalized across the state. No candidate for speaker had supported the change; Gaston Cantens, a Cuban American legislator who represented Miami, had refused to do so in the previous speaker race and ended up dropping out. But Rubio was amenable. “The rural legislators got their formula, and in exchange they went with Marco,” a former senior Democrat in the legislature told me. “Cantens was a carcass on the side of the road.” Rubio won. The Florida Bulldog, a regional newspaper, later calculated that the change had cost Miami teachers nearly a billion dollars. “The one constant in Marco Rubio’s career is that he has betrayed every mentor and every principle he’s ever had in order to claim power for himself,” a political figure in Miami told me.
In Florida, term limits make it harder for elected officials to acquire deep experience, and Rubio’s legislative record is relatively thin. For his first address as speaker, he placed a book titled “100 Innovative Ideas for Florida’s Future” on every legislator’s desk. The pages were blank; Rubio said that he wanted to fill them with proposals gathered from voters. This effort resulted in a few dozen successful, though mostly marginal, pieces of legislation, including one that expanded scholarships for private-school education and another that created an advisory committee to help make the government more efficient. “Give him credit,” a lobbyist working in Florida at the time told me. “He didn’t have a lot of ideas himself. It was a clever thing to do.”
