Rubio’s transformation may say as much about neoconservatism as it does about the man himself.
Rubio first? Donald Trump’s secretary of state and national security adviser, Marco Rubio, gives the thumbs up.(Yuri Cortez / AFP via Getty Images)
Afew days after Donald Trump was reelected, I traveled to Berlin for a series of meetings with political analysts and Bundestag members about the implications of the US election. I joked that I was there to assist in their grief therapy. Not only were they in shock about Trump’s return to power, but their own governing coalition was also in the process of collapsing.
Amid the general despair, I was struck by how many of them had latched on to Marco Rubio’s just-announced nomination for secretary of state as a source of hope. Rubio may be a right-wing conservative, they offered, but he believes in the sort of internationalism we all believe in, doesn’t he? He comes to the Munich Security Conference. He’s part of the Serious Foreign-Policy Club, right?
Abandon hope, I told them. Rubio’s nomination isn’t a sign that Trump might be a normal president; it’s a sign of how effectively Rubio has been housebroken.
The hope that Rubio would bring some sanity to a second Trump administration wasn’t limited to the conference hotels of Europe, of course. Rubio was confirmed unanimously by the Senate after sailing smoothly through his hearings. This is partly explained by the body’s notorious clubbiness and the fact that, as one of Trump’s earliest nominees, he benefited from the “honeymoon” period that all new presidents get. But Rubio also got a boost from the belief that he would be “the adult in the room.”
That hope has largely been demolished. Far from being a savior of the “rules-based order,” Rubio has established himself as one of the second Trump administration’s most consequential cabinet secretaries, skillfully serving as MAGA’s face on the global stage.
His recent address at the 2026 Munich Security Conference, which I attended, was a perfect showcase of Rubio’s new, Trumpier approach. A year after Vice President JD Vance’s right-wing populist harangue at the conference—in which he warned that the greatest danger facing Europe was “the threat from within”—Rubio offered merely a kinder, gentler version of that rant. He spoke of the “old friendship” between the United States and Europe and declared, “We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share.” But undergirding these nostalgic appeals was a paranoid vision of a white, Christian West against the rest, a menacing narrative of impending “civilizational erasure.”
“We do not want our allies to be weak,” Rubio warned, “because that makes us weaker. We want allies who can defend themselves so that no adversary will ever be tempted to test our collective strength. This is why we do not want our allies to be shackled by guilt and shame. We want allies who are proud of their culture and of their heritage, who understand that we are heirs to the same great and noble civilization.”
Rubio’s message was classic MAGA, but his softer delivery, coupled with the occasional love bomb, was enough for many in the audience. Having been conditioned for over a year by the Trump administration’s impetuous cruelty, they lapped it up, giving Rubio a standing ovation. On a panel immediately afterward, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen declared herself “very much reassured.”
A number of attendees told me later, though, that despite being adorned in the language of the High Foreign-Policy Church, Rubio’s speech was more or less the same message they’ve been hearing from the United States since Trump resumed office.
It’s a remarkable turn for Rubio—a man who, in the 2016 presidential primaries, was seen as the New and Improved Neocon. It was an impression that Rubio himself cultivated with his campaign slogan, “A New American Century”—a clear reference to the Project for the New American Century, the infamous neoconservative organization that pushed for war with Iraq in the late 1990s and early 2000s. A longtime cheerleader of that war, Rubio seemed ready to claim the aging John McCain’s mantle as the faction’s main avatar.
Rubio’s defenders argue that his late conversion to Trump’s America First cult was less dramatic than it seems because he was never a full-fledged neocon. While they acknowledge that the pose did have its uses—it helped him maintain the support of the Cuban diaspora as he managed his political rise—they insist he was not a committed ideologue. This may well be the case, but there’s also another interpretation: that not much real difference exists between neoconservatism, which uses human rights and democracy as a fig leaf for the application of US military power, and Trumpism, which sees no need for that fig leaf.
Even before February 28, the reasons for Donald Trump’s imploding approval rating were abundantly clear: untrammeled corruption and personal enrichment to the tune of billions of dollars during an affordability crisis, a foreign policy guided only by his own derelict sense of morality, and the deployment of a murderous campaign of occupation, detention, and deportation on American streets.
Now an undeclared, unauthorized, unpopular, and unconstitutional war of aggression against Iran has spread like wildfire through the region and into Europe. A new “forever war”—with an ever-increasing likelihood of American troops on the ground—may very well be upon us.
As we’ve seen over and over, this administration uses lies, misdirection, and attempts to flood the zone to justify its abuses of power at home and abroad. Just as Trump, Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth offer erratic and contradictory rationales for the attacks on Iran, the administration is also spreading the lie that the upcoming midterm elections are under threat from noncitizens on voter rolls. When these lies go unchecked, they become the basis for further authoritarian encroachment and war.
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The term neoconservative tends to be used promiscuously, but the truest expression of its ethos, at least when it comes to foreign policy, was offered by the historian and ideologue Michael Ledeen, as paraphrased by the writer Jonah Goldberg: “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.” Although articulated in 2002 in reference to Iraq, this is a good description of Trumpist foreign policy. When you understand that, for the neocons, talk of human rights, democracy, and freedom was always window dressing for an ideology supporting the unconstrained application of American power, you understand that the distance from neoconservatism to MAGA is actually very short.
Rubio bridged this distance gradually—and then rather suddenly. He spent Trump’s first term as a dependable vote in the Senate for the administration’s agenda but was by no means one of its most visible champions. An unmistakable sign of Rubio’s shift was his 2023 manifesto, “My Plan for American Renewal,” a trimming of his neoconservative sails in a more populist-nationalist direction, published in one of that faction’s key journals, the Pat Buchanan–founded American Conservative. He was also one of the Senate’s most vocal China hawks, often on the basis of human-rights concerns, during Trump’s first term and then the Biden presidency, but he has largely backed away from that in the past year, in keeping with Trump’s more conciliatory approach.
One of the most indelible images of the first few months of Trump’s second term was that of Rubio slumped down on an Oval Office couch, looking miserable as Trump and Vance berated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. At the time, many saw this as a sign of Rubio’s powerlessness. A year later, though, his stock seems to have risen. He has become the first person since Henry Kissinger to serve as both secretary of state and national-security adviser simultaneously. (Until recently, he also served as acting archivist of the United States, whatever that is.) “Rubio is really good at one important thing,” I was told by someone close to the administration. “He’s really good at husbanding and spending political capital on things he cares about, on not getting in needless fights when it doesn’t serve his top priority, which is the Western Hemisphere.”
This has required Rubio to be cold-blooded about his priorities. He stood by unconcerned as Elon Musk and his DOGE goons dismantled USAID, which has already resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. And he oversaw the mass layoffs of more than 1,000 career diplomats as part of the so-called Reduction in Force process—one of the most staggering acts of strategic self-harm in American history.
According to Dexter Filkins’s recent profile in The New Yorker, Rubio changed his story about DOGE’s foreign-aid cuts three times. He first told US embassy workers that he hadn’t known about the cuts and disagreed with them. Then he testified before the Senate Appropriations Committee that he’d made the cuts himself. Later, he privately assured senators that he would try to reverse them.
Whatever Rubio’s true feelings about the cuts, he was clearly not willing to endanger his political future by openly criticizing them. He has been willing, however, to stake that future on Latin America policy, for reasons both personal and political. Rubio reportedly played a key role in torpedoing a potential US deal with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro early last year, elbowing Trump adviser Rick Grenell out of the way in order to push for regime change. While that deal wasn’t struck with Maduro, it now seems to have been struck with his deputy, Delcy Rodríguez—a result far short of installing the anti-Chavista opposition that Rubio desired. And though he’s managed to keep his distance from the administration’s worst messes, Rubio now finds himself holding the bag for a policy of outright imperial extraction, which is not exactly an inspiring basis for a future presidential campaign. But if he can guide this policy toward regime change in Cuba, as he appears to be doing, this could provide a strong argument for his own presidency.
Rubio has said publicly that if JD Vance runs for president—which, in the absence of an earth-destroying meteor strike, he will—Rubio would support him. But no one should put any stock in that. Rubio surprised everyone when he ran against his early political mentor, Jeb Bush, in the 2016 primaries. And declaring his support for a Vance candidacy is a smart way to keep things cool in the White House and tamp down Washington journalists’ incessant score-keeping.
The truth is that Rubio has always been a shape-shifter. In a Tampa Bay Times profile published just before Rubio lost the 2016 primaries to Trump, journalist Alex Leary wrote, “The traits of Rubio’s success, as they often are in politics, make up the foundations of his failings. Impatience. Ambition. Opportunism.” The article quotes Tony DiMatteo, a Florida Republican who was instrumental in Rubio’s rise, and who summed him up this way: “He is extremely skilled and ambitious. He is also extremely not loyal.”
Matthew DussMatthew Duss is executive vice president of the Center for International Policy. From 2017 to 2022, he was foreign policy adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders.