Marco Rubio Has Made It to the Top of a Burning World
The secretary of state is now also the national security advisor, and even America’s chief archivist. Yet he doesn’t seem to be the top diplomat. What gives?
To sleep, perchance to dream ...
Photographer: Nathan Howard/AFP via Getty Images
At this early point in Donald Trump’s second term as president, Marco Rubio is riding higher than many predicted. Yet he appears simultaneously to be getting weaker and hollower by the day. That raises two questions. First, what is Rubio thinking? Second, who, if anybody, actually runs the engine rooms of American diplomacy and statecraft on behalf of the president?
When Trump picked the then-senator, a former rival for the Republican nomination in 2016, for secretary of state, Washington’s foreign-policy wonks assumed that Rubio would be among the first to be pushed out of the administration. Too stark were the differences in the two men’s worldviews — Trump’s transactional autocrats-come-hither, allies-be-damned nihilism versus the hawkish and often moralistic notions about American exceptionalism and leadership that Rubio used to hold. It did not necessarily help that Rubio, unlike Trump’s other nominees, was almost overqualified in his subject matter; Trump doesn’t like smart alecks in the room.