Rubio Teaches a Masterclass in Diplomacy
For MAGA conservatives, the secretary of state has been a pleasant surprise.
The world is still in chaos. A quarter century of bipartisan RINO-Neocon-Liberal-Imperialist-Democrat policies cannot be undone overnight. Yet the window of opportunity to restore peace and stability is open—and President Donald Trump is boldly taking it. However, time is short and the margin of error to avoid national and global catastrophe fearfully thin.
Nevertheless, Trump and his national security A-Team—Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and National Security Adviser Mike Waltz—have hit the ground running. Rubio, in particular, is already giving his frightful predecessor Antony Blinken and all of Policymaking Washington a masterclass in how an adult, intelligent, energetic, and forceful secretary of state conducts foreign policy.
First, Rubio has scrapped the witless obsessions of Blinken and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with geopolitical nonentities like Micronesia and Burkina Faso. Rubio is giving diplomatic priority to the great powers, notably, Russia.
Second, Rubio has courageously defied three-decade-old conventional wisdom, crafted by Zbigniew Brzezinski and his neocon running dogs, that 16 tiny tails among the new NATO member states should command the big dog who protects them and tell it what to do.
Ever since President Bill Clinton, egged on by Brzezinski and Madeleine Albright, made the fateful and catastrophic mistake of launching NATO’s eastward expansion, U.S. diplomats, policymakers, and pundits have held the delusion that they have more than a dozen world-consequential major powers on their side across Central and Eastern Europe instead of a lot of endlessly dependent, unreliable, and incompetent clients.
At last month’s Munich Security Conference, Rubio smoothed things over with the Europeans, who were upset that the U.S. was restarting diplomacy with Russia—and without them at the top table. Yet Rubio had already, a couple weeks earlier, given some indication as to why the White House wanted to repair diplomatic ties with the Kremlin, whether or not the Eurocrats in Brussels approved. In an interview with Megyn Kelly, Rubio explained that the unipolar moment was over and that we had entered into a multipolar world. “We face that now with China and to some extent Russia,” Rubio explained. Out is the crusade of Western democracies against autocracies, and in is hard-nosed realism.
Rubio flew from Munich to Riyadh, where he met with Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and tried to defuse perilous bilateral tensions that the Trump administration has inherited. This was no sell out, as the phony toughs of the Washington punditocracy have claimed. Rather, it was the kind of adult behavior that every responsible American secretary of state throughout the Cold War successfully practiced to prevent crises, defuse existing ones, and ensure that inevitable tensions between Us and Them were not allowed to escalate to Mutually Assured Destruction.
Third, Secretary Rubio, clearly working in close and full coordination with the White House, ensured he and his foremost colleagues—Hegseth, Waltz and Vice President J.D. Vance—were all on the same page and reading from the same script. That close coordination and smooth-running agreement was again demonstrated on Friday, February 28, when Trump and Vance faced down an inexcusable attempt by Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky to lecture top U.S. officials.
Zelensky had attempted, with reporters and cameras present, to browbeat the American head of state into pouring yet more money into Ukraine’s war effort and offering security guarantees that could lead to direct Russia-NATO conflict. And this despite Trump and Vance, with much patience, making clear that their primary goal was to rescue the long-suffering Ukrainian people from Zelensky’s own catastrophic policies that have cost a million precious lives in the last three years of needless war.
Much has been made of Rubio’s apparent lack of enthusiasm as he sat on the couch next to Vance, with many supposing he sympathized with Zelensky. This is pure speculation. In fact, Rubio has been perhaps the most eloquent defenders in the administration of Trump and Vance’s performance, and one of the most forceful critics of Zelensky’s. “[Y]ou start to perceive that maybe Zelensky doesn’t want a peace deal,” Rubio explained. “He says he does, but maybe he doesn’t.”
The White House hopes not only to get a peace deal in Ukraine but to put U.S.-Russia relations on firmer footing, and Rubio has done much to that end. When he met with Lavrov in Riyadh, he not only talked about cooperation, but acted to create it. The U.S. secretary of state proposed and agreed to establish new working bodies to resolve outstanding issues, deconflict main areas of disagreement and potential conflict, and even to end the petty harassment of Russian diplomats in Washington that the non-existing President Joe Biden and Blinken indulged in for so long.
This is the kind of heavy lifting that goes unheralded but is the indispensable basis for all long-lasting and stable diplomatic initiatives. No U.S. secretary of state since perhaps General Colin Powell, who de-escalated tensions between nuclear powers Indian and Pakistan, has realized that.
“Jaw, Jaw,” Winston Churchill famously said, “is better than War, War.” The Biden administration and their bipartisan Hosanna Chorus ignored that wise mantra for many years. Hecatombs of Ukrainian dead have resulted. And all the while, the Kiev government and their armchair-warrior champions in Brussels, London, and Paris have relentlessly pulled the United States towards the precipice of annihilating nuclear war. Secretary Rubio understands that too.
Rubio has also re-established another crucial tradition that the greatest grandmasters of American diplomacy from Benjamin Franklin through President Franklin Roosevelt and secretaries of state Henry Kissinger, George Schultz, and James A. Baker III all knew how to do. He is willing to travel a lot—but always to the main power centers that need to be prioritized. And he moves fast.
At every step, Secretary Rubio has been gentlemanly, controlled and dignified. At no point so far has he felt the need to strum a guitar—excruciatingly badly—as Blinken so memorably did last year in a Kiev night club. Instead, Rubio has been a textbook example of how responsible, experienced and above all adult senior U.S. diplomats were once expected to behave on the world’s stage in the correct and prioritized pursuit of their people’s national interests. An air of seriousness has returned to Foggy Bottom.
I was highly critical of many of Secretary Rubio’s positions in the Senate for many years. But to paraphrase fundamentalist Christians across the United States, there is nothing more pleasing to those of us who seek the survival of the republic than a neocon sinner come to repentance.
Thank you, Mr. Secretary.
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