Marco Rubio’s Soulless Crusade
The U.S. secretary of state stands for no principle other than serving the man who appointed him.
By Howard W. French, a columnist at Foreign Policy.
April 22, 2025
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.
This post is part of FP’s ongoing coverage of the Trump administration. Follow along here.Howard W. French is a columnist at Foreign Policy, a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and a longtime foreign correspondent. His latest book is Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War. Bluesky: @hofrenchbluesky.social X: @hofrench