Por Daniel W. Drezner

When the first round of Donald Trump’s cabinet selections was announced last month, I was in Germany, participating in a round-table conversation on the future of American foreign policy. As the only American involved, I received many befuddled questions from the German interlocutors. Most of the names prompted some degree of confusion or consternation except for one: Senator Marco Rubio of Florida for secretary of state.

Compared with someone accused of statutory rape (who has since withdrawn), someone accused of sexual assault and a suspected Russian sympathizer, Mr. Rubio looks conventional. He is a three-term senator who has long been keenly interested in foreign affairs. Multiple Democratic senators have already praised his selection, to the consternation of both the anti-interventionist left and the MAGA right.

The question to ask, however, is which Marco Rubio will show up at Foggy Bottom if he gets the job next year. Will he be a hawkish, open-markets, democracy-promoting optimist or a more inward-looking, antiglobalist pessimist? Either scenario is plausible because Mr. Rubio’s worldview has, to use the argot of the Beltway, evolved over the years. As populist nationalism consumed the Republican Party, Mr. Rubio shifted to accommodate Mr. Trump’s worldview. His hawkishness has mostly persisted while his embrace of globalization curdled. Even a cursory look at Mr. Rubio’s political evolution over the years suggests that his ultimate success will not hinge on his deep and genuine knowledge of world politics but rather his ability to position himself at the dead center of the G.O.P.’s fractured ideological spectrum.

As a metaphor for the transformation of the Republican Party in the 21st century, one could do worse than starting with Mr. Rubio’s books. Like many politicians on the rise, Mr. Rubio wrote one, titled “An American Son,” in 2012, which leaned heavily on his sunny view of the American dream: “I am the child of immigrants,” he wrote, “an American with a history that began somewhere else and with a special place in his heart for the land of lost dreams his parents had left, so their children wouldn’t lose theirs.”

Mr. Rubio’s rags-to-riches political narrative fit with his surprising rise to the U.S. Senate. During his time in the Florida House of Representatives, Mr. Rubio was known as a conservative who was willing to cross the partisan aisle. In 2004 he co-sponsored a bill in the Florida Legislature to provide in-state tuition to undocumented immigrants who met academic benchmarks. Riding the Tea Party wave of 2010, he won his Senate seat despite being the underdog to Charlie Crist, who was then the governor. Mr. Rubio’s relative youth and Cuban heritage marked him as a Republican on the rise.

Not many years later, Mr. Rubio was gearing up to run for president — and no longer a Washington outsider. He seemed to understand that just because he was elected as an insurgent “doesn’t mean he has to govern as one,” as Sam Tanenhaus wrote in The New York Times Magazine in 2014. His insider status was further reflected in his 2015 campaign book, “American Dreams: Restoring Economic Opportunity for Everyone.” Touting “reformist” ideas promoted by a group of Republicans — including what effectively amounted to a pathway to citizenship for some undocumented immigrants — Mr. Rubio’s book received praise from some unlikely quarters, including The New Republic. In the acknowledgments, he thanked the legendary Washington lawyer Bob Barnett, signaling that he was safely ensconced in the corridors of Beltway power.

Foreign policy did not feature prominently in “American Dreams,” but Mr. Rubio’s interest in the subject was clear from his first days in the Senate. Mr. Rubio served on both the Foreign Relations Committee and the Select Committee on Intelligence, and later, leaning into his 2016 presidential run, Mr. Rubio began articulating his worldview about foreign affairs in interviews and bylined articles for National Review and Foreign Affairs.

Mr. Rubio’s vision for American foreign policy in the 2010s rested on three pillars. The first was extreme hawkishness. Warning about threats ranging from Russia and China to Iran, Cuba and Venezuela, Mr. Rubio pushed for more military spending and robust American leadership to deter rivals. He opposed lifting economic sanctions on Cuba, Venezuela and pretty much any other major authoritarian regime. He supported stationing U.S. combat troops in Eastern Europe to protect NATO allies and deter Russian aggression.

Secondly, Mr. Rubio argued vigorously against any economic turn inward. Pushing back on colleagues calling for restraint in foreign policy, Mr. Rubio told The Times Magazine in 2014, “If you have a global economy, you cannot retreat from the world.” In Foreign Affairs, Mr. Rubio said that a “pillar” of his foreign policy was “the protection of an open international economy in an increasingly globalized world. Millions of the best jobs in this century will depend on international trade.” Even as he railed against most of President Barack Obama’s foreign policy, Rubio at the time expressed strong support for U.S. entry into the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Finally, Mr. Rubio forcefully articulated the need for American foreign policy to adhere to longstanding American values. In a 2015 speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, he criticized a realpolitik approach to American foreign policy this way:

In recent years, the ideals that have long formed the backbone of American foreign policy — a passionate defense of human rights, the strong support of democratic principles and the protection of the sovereignty of our allies — these values have been replaced by, at best, caution, and at worst, an outright willingness to betray those values for the expediency of negotiations with repressive regimes.

This is not just morally wrong. It is contrary to our interests. Because wherever freedom and human rights spread, partners for our nation are born. But whenever foreign policy comes unhinged from its moral purpose, it weakens global stability and forms cracks in our national resolve.

The mid-2010s feels like a political eon ago. Once Mr. Trump won the presidency in 2016 after attacking “Little Marco” on the campaign trail, the G.O.P.’s center of gravity shifted — and Mr. Rubio shifted as well. That change was reflected in his 2023 book, “Decades of Decadence: How Our Spoiled Elites Blew America’s Inheritance of Liberty, Security and Prosperity.” The title says it all: Whatever optimism Mr. Rubio brought to the table in his first tomes was gone, replaced by a MAGA nostalgia for yesteryear.

From his new outlook, he argued that while he grew up when the American dream was possible, “spoiled elites” had destroyed that opportunity for future generations. “Today we are weaker, more fractured and less confident than we ought to be,” he wrote. “It started when the elites of both parties began to tell us that better jobs and cheaper goods would make up for the jobs we’d lost to Mexico and China.”

Mr. Rubio has preserved some of his early hawkishness, particularly with respect to China and Iran, insofar as they still fit into the current G.O.P. mainstream. On Ukraine, however, the Florida senator has begun sounding more like his potential future boss. After years of full-throated support for Ukrainian sovereignty, he voted against the foreign aid bill that helped to arm Ukraine earlier this year. In November, he argued that the United States was “funding a stalemate” that “needs to be brought to a conclusion.” Now it looks quite likely that in 2025 Mr. Rubio will be the president’s wingman in negotiating with a repressive regime for an end to Mr. Putin’s illegal invasion. In a recent appearance on “Face the Nation,” he said, “It’s easy to be for war when you’re in some fancy building and you’re safe and sound in Washington, D.C.”

Mr. Rubio’s elasticity has enabled him to survive and thrive in the rough seas of the Trump years. Compared with the prospect of Tulsi Gabbard as national intelligence director and Pete Hegseth as defense secretary, Mr. Rubio has a deeper understanding of the state of the world. And he will have a likely ally in the White House in Mr. Trump’s pick for national security adviser, the fellow hawk Mike Waltz. Mr. Rubio’s own hawkishness will mesh well with the MAGA view on Latin America; expect to see lots of American force used in that region to combat drug cartels and other malign actors. In a conventional presidential administration, one would expect Mr. Rubio to wield a lot of clout.

This is not a conventional administration, however. We saw in Mr. Trump’s first term that cabinet appointees tended to have a short life, subject to the vagaries of Mr. Trump’s ego and who is leaking what to Fox News. Mr. Rubio’s prior embrace of neoconservative views presumably renders him suspect to a lot of Mr. Trump’s coalition. Furthermore, Mr. Trump himself will start his second term far more confident in his foreign policy views than he was eight years ago.

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Daniel W. Drezner is a distinguished professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. The views expressed are not necessarily those of EnergiesNet.com.

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in TheNew York Times, December 08, 2024. We reproduce it for the benefit of readers. EnergiesNet.com is not responsible for the value judgments made by its contributors and opinion and analysis columnists.

Opinion | The Evolution of Marco Rubio – The New York Times

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energiesNet.com 12 08 2024