When Marco Rubio was announced as President Donald Trump’s secretary of state, it turned more than a few heads. A faction of the MAGA movement was enraged that Trump had appointed someone they considered to be a neoconservative to the most important foreign policy post in his Cabinet, with some questioning whether the 47th president had taken an abrupt turn on his stated desire to avoid unnecessary wars.
It’s absolutely fair to say that at the beginning of his career, Rubio was party to the Bush-era neoconservative persuasion. He supported military intervention in Libya in 2011 that led to a catastrophic failed state, the return of slavery, and a humanitarian crisis in North Africa and eventually Europe. The overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi and the subsequent migrant crisis into Italy led to the rise of the populist Right across Europe, including the election of Giorgia Meloni as prime minister.
Though he opposed further military engagement in Syria in 2013, as a presidential candidate in 2016, Rubio’s vision of American foreign policy was rooted in the neoliberal pillars of free trade, a robust American foreign policy to promote our core values, and an ultimate goal to “restore the post-1945 bipartisan presidential tradition of a strong and engaged America while adjusting it to meet the new realities of a globalized world.”
Yet the Marco Rubio who assumed the office of secretary of state on Tuesday is an evolved man compared to the one who ran for president on a foreign policy platform more at home in the Republican Party of 2003.
Since his ill-fated presidential bid, Rubio has carved out his own niche within the “America First” movement, something he more or less outlined in his 2023 book Decades of Decadence: How Our Spoiled Elites Blew America’s Inheritance of Liberty, Security, and Prosperity. Far from praising the golden calf of mass consumerism and free market neoliberalism, Rubio derided the notion that the United States is a consumer nation. At the same time, he slammed free traders and the Chamber of Commerce for opening up China to the global economy, while championing what he called “common good capitalism.”
“I think of capitalism a lot like I think of fire,” Rubio wrote in his book. “Human civilization couldn’t exist without fire. Fire is an important and good thing. But it is not an absolute good. Fire run amok is destructive. Fire must be tended to and cared for. The same is true for capitalism. Capitalism must be cared for by capitalists who prioritize the well-being of their workers, the strength of their communities, and the health of their nation. Capitalism must be cared for by workers who understand their obligation to work and to contribute responsibly to our nation.”
This is a far cry from the man who made the defense of globalization a cornerstone of his presidential campaign. He’s more nationalistic, more centered in Catholic theology, and has flavors of populism coursing throughout his ideology.
He wrote that the neoliberal consensus following the end of the Cold War is antithetical to conservatism. The idea that corporatism, globalism, a Wilsonian foreign policy, and the hubris of the governing class cannot undermine the conditioning that thousands of years of human nature have cemented on people.
This is very important when considering what role Rubio will play as the new secretary of state.
While Rubio has never navel-gazed at the two decades of quagmires in the Middle East, openly stating that the Wilsonian idea that the United States could remake the world into the image of a Jeffersonian democracy was naive at best, his commitment to preventing China from surpassing the U.S. deeply mirrors the image that Trump painted during his three presidential campaigns.
Rubio has admitted that opening China to the world’s economy and allowing it to become a manufacturing powerhouse through our free trade agreements was a mistake. That a strong American century starts by reclaiming our own economic independence from a communist nation that seeks to replace us as the world’s leader. While his language is less colorful than Trump’s, the overall opinion of both men toward China and the hollowing out of America to the Chinese Communist Party is very close ideologically.
Throughout the last decade, Rubio has understood the anger of Trump and his voters for the political elite who sold out the country’s interest and enriched our largest geopolitical opponent for the sake of their ideology that promised global democracy.
While the media have often given the image that Trump is a dove on Iran, Russia, and China because he has complimented their leaders as being “smart” or “tough,” he has also offered weapons to Ukraine, executed Iranian generals, and placed heavy tariffs on Chinese President Xi Jinping’s government. The empty platitudes offered to foreign adversaries haven’t weakened Trump’s policies on any of those governments.
Are there issues where Rubio is likely to press Trump on — such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? Perhaps. Rubio is definitely more aggressive than Trump, whose only firm position on the war is that it wouldn’t have started had he still been in office in 2021. But remember, Trump was the president who gave Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky the Javelin anti-tank missiles that slowed Russia’s invasion of Kyiv when the war began.
The idea that Trump loves Putin while Rubio is rattling sabers only exists in the minds of pundits who profit off of feeding hate to their fans.
If anything, the major difference between Rubio’s approach to foreign policy and the 47th president’s is one of semantics, and the two men could ultimately complement each other.
Trump’s madman style of foreign policy, in which both friend and foe are fearful of crossing him because they’re unsure of how he’d react, could be a good match for Rubio’s pragmatism. Rather than good cop/bad cop, it could be a case of a good diplomat/mad president has the potential to cast Rubio as a statesman the foreign leaders can work with. There’s clear trust by his colleagues in the Senate that he’ll be a levelheaded actor on the world stage, given the unanimous support he received from his former colleagues in the Senate.
While there have been some major areas of foreign policy disagreements in the past, especially surrounding the Middle East, Rubio and Trump have a shared vision of American hegemony that pushes back against China, draws Europe closer to Washington, and expands greater influence in South and Central America.
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Rubio is not the same 39-year-old wunderkind that walked into the Senate more than a decade ago, and unlike so many politicians who attempt to win over fanfare from Trump and his supporters by becoming a dime-store version of the man or acting like an obsessed fan, his shared vision of America’s ability to lead into the next century will be a net positive for the new administration. The commentary that Trump has allowed the neocon foxes in the hen house says more about the punditry class’s willingness to spin anything into a negative story about the new president than it is the truth.
Only time will tell if Rubio will be a successful secretary of state, but his ideology is more in line with the president than most of the think tanks that thought they could create flourishing democracies throughout the Middle East two decades ago.
Ryan Girdusky is the founder of the 1776 Project PAC, the host of A Numbers Game Podcast, and a political consultant.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
