Rubio Would Be a Terrible Choice for Secretary of State

A Rubio appointment would be one of the worst choices Trump could make, so it wouldn’t surprise me if this is what ends up happening.

Trump named the very hawkish Rep. Elise Stefanik to be the next ambassador to the United Nations. I discussed that in a new column today. As if that weren’t bad enough, Marco Rubio is being considered for Secretary of State and there are reports that he is likely to get the job:

Meanwhile, Republican Party sources assess that Trump's rejection of Mike Pompeo increases the likelihood of Senator Marco Rubio being selected as the next Secretary of State.

Rubio, a Florida senator and strong supporter of Israel, has grown considerably closer to Trump in recent months and attended the victory event in West Palm Beach on Tuesday night. According to two sources, the chances of his selection as America's top diplomat are high.

A Rubio appointment would be one of the worst choices Trump could make, so it wouldn’t surprise me if this is what ends up happening. When Trump said that Pompeo wouldn’t be serving in the administration, that was welcome news but it didn’t mean that he wouldn’t pick other equally bad or even worse people to fill the top jobs. It seems bizarre to think that Rubio, of all people, has a good chance of getting a top Cabinet job in a Trump administration, but he has been currying favor with Trump for years and his bootlicking may have finally paid off.

When Trump didn’t choose Rubio as his running mate, it seemed that we had dodged a bullet, but putting Rubio in charge of a major department might be worse in terms of his influence over policy. Like Pompeo, Rubio despises diplomacy, so he would mostly be in the business of issuing ultimatums and threats as a prelude to more economic warfare or military action. A Rubio-led State Department would be bad news for U.S. relations with most states in our hemisphere. Rubio would likely seize the opportunity to pursue his ideological vendettas against Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. In intra-administration debates, Rubio would be a reliable advocate for intervention. It is hard to imagine a scenario where Rubio tries to restrain Trump’s militarism rather than goad him into launching unnecessary attacks.

It is worth bearing in mind that Rubio has an overall abysmal foreign policy record over the last thirteen years since he entered the Senate. He has been a knee-jerk interventionist in the mold of John McCain and Lindsey Graham, and not that long ago he was the preferred candidate of Republican hardliners and neoconservatives. As Christopher Preble noted back in 2015, “He’s a very strong supporter of intervention generally, and supported the use of force by President Obama as well as President Bush, even at a time it wasn’t politically popular.” Rubio has proved to be enough of an opportunist to accommodate himself to Trump’s takeover of the party, but as we saw during the first term Rubio’s hawkish worldview and Trump’s weren’t as different as either man’s supporters wanted to believe.

Let’s remember that Rubio was essentially running Trump’s Venezuela policy in the first term, and it was Rubio and his allies that encouraged Trump to pursue his destructive unsuccessful regime change policy there. “Maximum pressure” in Venezuela completely failed in its goals, but it devastated the country and impoverished tens of millions of people. It was a monstrous and stupid policy, and Rubio’s fingerprints were all over it. That is the sort of hare-brained policymaking that we can expect if Rubio is given a major role in the next administration. Maybe Trump would be reluctant to follow Rubio’s advice after the embarrassing failure of his Venezuela policy, but Rubio presumably wouldn’t be in the running for Secretary of State if Trump had lost confidence in him.

Unfortunately, Trump will probably receive praise from many Washington pundits and foreign policy professionals if he chooses Rubio. They will probably say that Trump has made a “responsible” and “serious” choice when it will be anything but that. Picking Rubio would be a major error. It would be bad news for the U.S. and the world if Trump chooses him.