Daniel W. Drezner from Drezner’s World Why Isn't Marco Rubio Doing His Job? The allegedly competent Trump advisor sure seems to be avoiding giving advice on the most important foreign policy issue of the day. Daniel W. Drezner Aug 5

 Daniel W. Drezner from Drezner’s World<danieldrezner@substack.com>

Why Isn't Marco Rubio Doing His Job?

The allegedly competent Trump advisor sure seems to be avoiding giving advice on the most important foreign policy issue of the day.

Daniel W. Drezner

Aug 5

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The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has not written about Marco Rubio in more than two months. That seems unfair — in that time I’ve written not one but two columns about JD Vance. Heck, I’ve even opined about Elbridge Colby. Rubio, the man who is both Trump’s national security advisor and his secretary of state, deserves a column of his very own every once in a while!

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The reason I have not written much about Rubio is that, to be blunt, he hasn’t been in the news all that much. He seems to be focused primarily on Cuba right now. One Trumpworld source told Politico’s Dasha Burns and Nahal Toosi that Cuba is a “huge priority of Rubio’s,” which might explain why the administration has surged intelligence assets into the country.

In an administration in which frenetic media activity is usually correlated with destructive or dysfunctional behavior, maybe Rubio’s monomania about Latin America is a good thing. After all, folks like Bill Pulte and Pete Hegseth have been far more prominent, and all they seem to do is make strategic messes.

The thing is, Marco Rubio is not the Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America; he’s the president’s chief foreign policy advisor. He is supposed to be running the interagency policy process as well as the State Department. And it’s becoming increasingly clear that he’s not running a damn thing.

Consider the State Department. Rubio’s draconian budget cuts have midwifed a clown car of a department. At the largest AIDS conference in the world, for example, the team at State produced an AI-generated map that, as Reuters put it, “mislabeled every country.” Health expert Emily Bass provided even more embarrassing details:

A senior US State Department official displayed a map of Africa that was completely wrong before high-level officials from African nations, including some whose countries had been mislabelled. The map mishap occurred during a presentation at “Transforming health assistance: Implementing U.S. government MOUs for sustainable HIV programs,” a pre-conference event at the largest AIDS conference in the world, held this year in Rio de Janeiro.

The map mis-identified the locations of Cote d’Ivoire, Mozambique, Nigeria by enormous margins—making Nigeria landlocked, Mozambique an east African nation and Cote d’Ivoire a southern African state. The map put Uganda and Malawi in the right vicinity, but with the wrong borders. And it nope’d out altogether for Cameroon, which doesn’t have a line connecting the name to a country at all.

Look, this should be basic Diplomacy 101 stuff, and yet Rubio’s State Department keeps screwing it up. It’s amateur hour at Foggy Bottom.

Meanwhile, Rubio’s approach to human rights has also been a disaster. Writing in Foreign Policy, Amnesty International USA’s Amanda Klasing provides a grim assessment:

With so much focus on the administration’s militarized and often unlawful foreign policy—including the invasions of Venezuela and Iran and hundreds of extrajudicial killings in airstrikes at sea—it’s easy to overlook the destruction that Rubio has caused to the diplomatic system that offers alternatives. But over the past nearly 18 months, Rubio has led an all-out assault on human rights in U.S. statecraft, mostly bypassing Congress to do so.

Rubio has slashed foreign assistance and humanitarian aid, decimated human rights programs addressing everything from torture to atrocity prevention, politicized the department’s annual human rights reports, gutted key human rights offices and bureaus, withdrawn or disengaged from global human rights systems at the U.N. and elsewhere, and threatened international justice mechanisms, all while promoting a vague “natural rights” framework to supplant the concept of international human rights.

At this point, he must be seen as the chief architect and implementor of dismantling the State Department systems that were designed to uphold and engage the rules-based order that protects human rights and promotes global peace and security….

Under Rubio, the State Department appears to be very near to giving up on human rights entirely. Despite a few instances where policy decisions have aligned with human rights advocacy asks—such as, for many groups, sanctions against various bad actors in Africa and Latin America—Rubio has contributed to large-scale erosion of U.S. human rights leadership, weakened global human rights mechanisms, undermined cooperation abroad on human rights, and hamstrung Washington’s capacity to respond to abuses.

Taken together, Rubio’s most enduring legacy may end up being the collapse of U.S. capacity to shape and enforce global norms and policies at the U.N. and other spaces.

Little wonder that more people in more countries view the U.S. more negatively than China.¹

Now, one could argue that Rubio has to prioritize his battles. He has made a conscious decision to spend more time in the White House than in Foggy Bottom or traveling overseas because he needs to be in the room with Trump to influence policy. This is a point that Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan make in Regime Change: Rubio recognizes that he’s been derelict in his State Department duties because proximity to Trump is what matters on the big foreign policy issues.

Fair enough. But it seems awfully telling that on the Iran war — easily the administration’s biggest foreign policy challenge right now — Marco Rubio is still nowhere to be found.

Indeed, Rubio’s distance from Iran has been so noticeable that the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman commented on it to Ezra Klein. “Marco Rubio had a lot of capital with Trump for a long time. I think he still does, but he is really not that involved in the Iran issue,” she told Klein. When asked if that was Trump’s preference, she replied, “I think that Trump would welcome his involvement more.”

This touches on something I pointed out back in March:

It’s not obvious at all that Rubio has provided any value-added over any other lapdog who would have occupied his position in his stead. Like everyone else, he has functioned as a yes man for Trump. Indeed, he has failed in both of his foreign policy roles. As national security advisor, he has administered no real policymaking process. As Secretary of State, he has failed to persuade any one about the wisdom of U.S. military action. Instead, as I wrote earlier this week, “here’s the thing about the Trump administration: it’s not just that their policies do not make a ton of sense or that they failed to do any strategic planning. It’s that they don’t care that they haven’t put in the work.”

Marco Rubio is not the architect of the Iran clusterfuck. But he is most definitely the author of the conditions that make the clusterfuck possible. At some point, the reckoning for his negligence will come back to haunt him.

So, to sump up: Marco Rubio is not really running the State Department, and the erosion of State’s ability to do much of anything is becoming readily apparent. Rubio is instead sticking close to Trump to advise him — except on important things like Iran.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Marco Rubio does not provide any value-added above a generic Trump flunkie.

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To be fair this probably has way more to do with Trump than Rubio.