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November 13, 2024 - 11:15am
What a difference a year — or eight — makes. In 2016, Florida Senator Marco Rubio emerged as the last hope of anti-Trump forces within the Republican primary. By 2024, he was on the shortlist to be nominated as Donald Trump’s vice-presidential running mate. And now, if reports out of Trumpworld are accurate, Rubio is soon to be nominated as secretary of state in the coming administration.
Trump’s cabinet formation began with the declaration that Nikki Haley and Mike Pompeo would not be considered for jobs this time around. They were members of the first-term administration but ran against Trump — or at least explored the possibility, in Pompeo’s case — in 2024. At the time of that announcement, some in the media saw it as a rejection of Republicans who had backed American support for Ukraine in its war against Russia. But with the reported nomination of Rubio and of Rep. Michael Waltz for National Security Advisor, it now looks more like a choice between those who were loyal and disloyal to Trump personally.
Rubio’s nomination should be satisfying to rank-and-file Republicans in a variety of ways. For one thing, he is a known entity. Many of Trump’s first-term appointees were not familiar to the wider political world, adding to the uncertainty about how they would govern. Rubio has been in the Senate for nearly 14 years and has run for president. His views are well-known, with a track record in the legislature to back them up.
Those views should also be reassuring to average conservatives, whether they consider themselves MAGA or not. Rubio has been at the forefront of the movement to recognise that China is the greatest threat to the United States and to the wider world order. In a 2021 article for American Prospect, Rubio pointed out what America can do to reduce China’s power over the global economy. He proposed preventing federal pensions from investing in companies controlled by the CCP or China’s military — of which there are many — and further suggested banning such companies from access to US capital markets. He introduced legislation on both of these points as a senator.
On the growing threat posed by Iran, Rubio is also a hawk. He has recently criticised the Biden administration’s soft touch in dealing with the Islamic Republic, noting the connection between cash earned through weakened sanctions on Iran and cash spent in service of terror against Israel and other allies of the United States. He called for Joe Biden to restore the Houthis — an Iranian cat’s paw — to the foreign terrorist organisation list, where they clearly belong.
These are all mainstream conservative positions, not the retreat into isolationism that some feared from Trump. But neither is it fair to say that Rubio and Trump are “itching for war”, as some pundits on the Left have suggested. The architects of the Iraq War have found little favour in the Trump administration. Indeed, Dick Cheney backed Trump’s Democratic opponent, while George W. Bush, John Bolton, and others stayed pointedly silent ahead of the election. At one point, The Bulwark editor Jonathan V. Last joked — approvingly — that the neoconservatives had taken over the Democratic Party.
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SubscribeYou might say
“But with the reported nomination of Rubio and of Rep. Michael Waltz for National Security Advisor, it now looks more like a choice between those who were loyal and disloyal to Trump personally”
or you might say
“But with the reported nomination of Rubio and of Rep. Michael Waltz for National Security Advisor, it now looks more like a choice between those who share Trump’s political views and those who do not”
Small but significant difference.
I was thinking the same thing. He booted out two establishment Trojan horses who ultimately undermined his desired policy and then proceed to try to recapture the party for the old establishment, and replaced them with two actual independent minded populist leaning types who are endorsers of the party’s transition from what it was pre-Trump. He has learned from his mistakes it seems.
Or he has the ability to go his way because he’s now in his second term. May as well aim for the fences.
Yes indeed…designating the Houthis as terrorists will work when the presence of the US Navy didn’t…
It’s symbolic, but it establishes that they are not a legitimate group that the US could or should engage with, regardless of their ability to wreak havoc on shipping lanes. Let’s be honest here. If the US Navy couldn’t stop the Houthis, who realistically could? Technology is such that a few cheap drones can’t be easily countered by warships that were designed to evade and counter Russian/Chinese/Soviet missile systems and act as a platform for other forms of power projection. That happens in the history of warfare. Machine guns made mounted cavalry obsolete. Aircraft carriers made battleships obsolete. Tanks and aircraft enabled blitzkrieg style attacks that broke the WWI dynamic of trench warfare. We need new technologies and tactics for this new era of drone warfare, and that’s something that may take time.
If stopping the Houthis at the current stage would require troops on the ground, we’ve been there and done that. I’ll pass on another repetition of Afghanistan/Iraq. The only thing to do is designate them as an enemy and treat them as such. Doesn’t mean we have to ‘do’ anything. It wasn’t our shipping that was threatened anyway. The Red Sea shipping lanes are not a vital interest to the American people or American commerce, hence the unwillingness of military leaders to use up all our stores of ammunition fighting them. It’s up to the countries who depend upon that shipping lane to handle the Houthis however they wish, either through negotiations or warfare. Beyond declaring them to be what they clearly are, we need not pay any attention to the Houthis.
The difficulty is that the symbolism is utterly meaningless, indeed counter productive.
The entire world knows that the USA cannot stop the Houthi attacks closing the Red Sea to shipping the Houthis designate as hostile.
The USA then says they are terrorists and won’t deal with them. Well they were never going to…until, of course they need to. It is always the case…the “ruling” power says “the other lot” are bad guys and we don’t deal with bad guys…but then the bad guys have something the rulers need them for. It may be help against someone else, or just to get some peace and quiet from them. And yes the rulers deal with them.
As you say, the USA has no interest whatsoever in the Red Sea being closed by the Houthis…but it did launch Operation whatever pompous name it was…and failed, as the world saw. The USA did “do something” and revealed its impotence
The problem the USA has is that it has passed the point of “peak power”, but its ruling oligarchy either doesn’t know, or possibly accept, it. I think the US people realise it because the economic reality impacts them.
Indeed in your comment you accept that the USA should only look after its own interests. And those interests cannot include picking conflicts which it cannot be seen to lose.
One must hope Rubio is a realist, not a fantasist, believing that the USA can impose whatever it chooses.
He’ll have his work cut out with the neocons dominating the State Department Blob, but good luck to him. If he can put an end to the Ukraine conflict and avoid starting any new ones he’ll have done a good job.
Excellent analysis
Rubio at State reads like a DC insider to head DC’s ultimate insider closed shop.
There are different visions of what American power should and will look like in the next generation. There is still not a great deal of support for total withdrawal and isolationism. The only people in that camp at the moment are libertarians (who are basically always in that camp) and the people who are hung up on the ‘national debt’ and such financial indicators of national health and don’t believe America can afford to sustain it’s military commitments anywhere. These are not representative of most Republican leaders even in the Trump wing.
I expect the principal difference will be that America’s defense policy should actually benefit American citizens, not some nebulous notion of ‘global security’ or international trade in general. Rubio is only a hawk in that he understands China is a rival who was never our friend and who we enabled to become a peer rival. He’s far likelier to name the enemy outright rather than pay lip service to our economic relations with the Chinese. He’s far more likely to coordinate with the rest of the administration such that economic policy towards China begins to resemble and complement diplomatic and defense policy. If you currently have money invested in China or in companies that are heavily dependent on commerce with China, I’d say now is the time to sell, while you still have something to sell. I expect he’ll be more of a pragmatist regarding Ukraine and try to push Zelensky to negotiate an end to the war.
Overall, I expect more of the transactional, nation to nation, diplomacy that characterized Trump’s first administration. He will demand, and probably get, Europe to either increase its own defense spending on NATO, or pay for a continued American presence there in some fashion, either directly or through political/economic favors as a way to help pay for his reforms, some of which will not be cheap. He will use what’s left of America’s imperial might to extract whatever value he can from American vassal states while focusing his efforts at alliance building on places that actually matter like India, Japan, and southeast Asia, and where a significant manufacturing base to rival the Chinese is already being built. I do believe that overt military action will be rare and specifically targeted towards specific goals that advance America’s vital interests, such as the assassination of a terrorist leader or a show of force in the South China Sea. There will be no sending of the Navy to defend shipping lanes we don’t use from random terrorists. There will be an overall reduction in international peacekeeping forces and I wouldn’t be shocked if we close some foreign bases, especially in Europe. I also wouldn’t be shocked to see an overall cut in military and defense personnel on the periphery and in the military bureaucracy whether or not there are actual troop level is reduced.
Interesting analysis. Let me respond on a few points.
First, maybe your comments are geared mostly toward what Donald Trump will do rather than Marco Rubio, I couldn’t quite tell. But I don’t think Marco Rubio’s views are all that important here. Donald Trump is very hands-on, and more pragmatic and reactive than ideological. He’ll make the decisions, not Marco Rubio or any other secretary of state. We saw that with the North Korea negotiations in Donald Trump’s first term. That was all Donald Trump and not his secretary of state or national security advisor. For better or for worse, I think we will see the same with regard to Ukraine and China during his second term.
Second, I don’t think companies doing business with China will get out of the country. Take Apple, for instance. Apple can’t make its products here. We don’t have the manufacturing ecosystem to do it. There is a fascinating book called The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone, by Brain Merchant. It paints a canvas that has plenty of dark tones on it (and his latest book Blood in the Machine is even darker, though it is not about China). But it does show how Steve Jobs could not have created the iPhone in the United States. Tim Cook now faces the same problem.
Third, I think we ought to treat the Chinese as a competitor rather than an enemy, and get competing. Look at electric cars. Apple decided to build an electric car and threw a lot of resources into an effort called Project Titan. After 10 years and $10 billion they had come up with a car that would cost at least $100,000 but would still be unprofitable for the foreseeable future. Apple shut the project down without ever getting close to production.
Compare that with China. Warren Buffett invested years ago in a Chinese company called BYD (Build Your Dream) that is now the world leader in electric car sales, selling twice as many cars as Tesla last quarter. Their cars are cheaper, in both cost and quality, but they are improving.. BYD is a solid company internationally, not just in China.
But the big story is the competition in China. Unlike in the US, the barriers to entry in carmaking are low and specialist companies can jump in. While Apple’s car project failed mightily, a Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi took advantage of the vibrant carmaking ecosystem to design and build an electric car with mostly off-the-shelf hardware that it then integrated with its own infotainment systems.
The result? A luxury car with a stunning UX (user experience) that sells for $30,000 and does 0 to 60 in 2.9 seconds with 500 miles range. Ford’s CEO Jim Farley had one bought in Shanghai and airlifted to Chicago six months ago and he has been driving it ever since. He loves the car. He says Ford’s competition in the future is not GM and it’s not Toyota. It’s China. And he’s right.
I was and remain delighted at the defeat of Kamala Harris, but that has never meant that I was pleased at the victory of Donald Trump. His nominees for foreign policy positions are Israel Firsters, China hawks, and in at least some cases Russia hawks. His choice for Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, ticks all three boxes with gusto.
Therefore, on the pertinent issues, how would Harris’s nominee have differed from Rubio? How would her nominee for National Security Adviser have differed from Michael Waltz? How would her nominee for Secretary of Homeland Security have differed from Kristi Noem? How would her nominee for Ambassador to the United Nations have differed from Elise Stefanik? How would her nominee for Ambassador to Israel have differed from Mike Huckabee? One of those would have been Lynne Cheney, and all of them might as well have been.
We now await Trump’s nominations to economic policy portfolios. Again, expect disappointment for the young men and the black men, the self-organised working class and the Left, whose abstentions, third party votes, and votes for Trump, expanded him beyond his 2020 vote that, if repeated on its own, would have repeated the 2020 result. But again, whom would Harris have had? Stephanie Kelton? Hardly!
And everyone has always expected this. It has never been the point, which is that the marker has been put down. Young men and black men, Latinos and the Native Americans who voted for Trump by two to one, Muslims and Christian Arabs, the working class and the Left: you cannot win without those, it is probably now fair to assume that you could not lose with them, they are all now firmly in play, and whoever was the next President will be a first termer
«His nominees for foreign policy positions are Israel Firsters, China hawks, and in at least some cases Russia hawks» – Who do you want to surrender to first: Iran, Russia, or China?
Biden, if you look at his actions and not his rhetoric, is ready to surrender to any of them.
Fighting the next election already huh?
In which country?
Marco Rubio is not an outstanding pick for secretary of state, but I can’t think of anyone better. He’s a solid if not inspired choice. But Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense? That’s just bizarre.
As is the creation of the “department of government efficiency” headed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, which appears to be just a literal joke (DOGE being a cryptocurrency Elon Musk used to tout). It’s not even a government body, just some sort of private think tank that only exists until July 4, 2026 (the 250th birthday of the US) and has no authority to do anything.
George Washington had just four members in his cabinet — the secretaries of state (Thomas Jefferson), treasury (Alexander Hamilton), and war (Henry Knox), and the attorney general (Edmund Randolph). Over the years 12 more cabinet officers have been added, but they are not important as those big four.
Donald Trump has yet to pick a secretary of treasury or attorney general. Unless those are solid picks, I am not going to rest easy. I mean, Pete Hegseth? Really?
UPDATE: I just saw that Donald Trump nominated Matt Gaetz as attorney general. Can I have my vote back? I live in California. It still hasn’t been counted. I didn’t know that a vote for Donald Trump was a vote for people like Pete Hegseth or Matt Gaetz. JD Vance was bad enough, but this is ridiculous.
July 2026
Oops, my mistake, now corrected.
Did you actually even vote for Trump? What Republican would you have found acceptable for these positions? I mean if you oppose JD Vance but support Trump that makes no sense.
We can only wish him luck – Trump’s idiosyncratic personnel policy from his last term doesn’t guarantee he’ll even be in post come January.