Marco Rubio and the death of diplomacy

There is no more important or more prestigious cabinet position than the Foreign Minister. The first secretaries included lights such as Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay. All became presidents or almost reached the presidency. The contemporary times were also Henry Stimson, George Marshall, Dean Acheson, Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell and John Kerry. Recent secretaries were less competent or successful (Rex Tillerson, Mike Pompeo), but nobody was more miserable than the current secretary Marco Rubio, who embarrassed the country, the Foreign Ministry and especially in the first 100 days of the Trump presidency.

Rubio made the Foreign Ministry practically irrelevant and has no role in important negotiations with wars between Russia and Ukraine as well as between Israel and the Palestinians. Rubio does not take part in the sensitive conversations between the United States and the Iran to restore the Iranian nuclear deal. All of these matters are treated by a billionaire real estate developer, Steve Witkoff, who has no experience or knowledge of dealing with one of these topics. But Witkoff has a value of 2 billion US dollars, and Trump believed that it was a good training for creating complicated international agreements.

Witkoff has met four times with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the past few months, but the Russian bombing against Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, has only increased during this time. We know very little about Witkoff's experiences in this meeting, but we know that Trump mistakenly believes that Putin has made key “concessions”. According to Trump, the first concession is that Putin will “stop war”. The second is even more risky: Putin agreed to “not take the whole country”. Even before the Putin-Witkoff talks, Trump Putin's important demands: “The Crimea will stay with Russia” and Ukraine “will never be able to join NATO”.

After the latest discussions between Putin and Witkoff last week, Putin's important foreign policy consultant Yuri Ushakov praised the meeting that “Russia and the United States were able to bring their positions closer together not only in Ukraine, but also in a number of other international questions”. Trump only said that he had heard that Witkoff and Putin had “a pretty good meeting” but couldn't speak directly to his envoy. As far as other global affairs are concerned, Trump mistakenly claimed that he had concluded “200 economic agreements”, and that the discussions on trade and tariff matters between China and the United States had officially started Beijing.

Before Witkoff left his 6 -billion dollar apartment in Miami Beach and arrived in the White House, Rubio had already started the destruction of the Foreign Ministry and the important humanitarian and infrastructure projects of the agency for international development (AID) that were so important worldwide. The position of the Understate Secretary for Civil Security, Democracy and Human Rights is removed. The Office for Global Criminal Justice, which examines war crimes and conflict operations to prevent wars. My 42 years of bureaucratic experiences show me that folding a smaller office is essentially less resources and less bandwidth and the end of the institutional memory.

Elon Musk's removal of help is a good example of the damage that Rubio inherited and even expanded. There were 10,000 employees before the Trump administration arrived; There are now 10 full -time employees who have been cut off to the Foreign Ministry. Just as President Bill Clinton has been eliminating the armaments and disarmament in 1999, weakening important armaments control agreements, the elimination of help means that there will be no longer an independent humanitarian aid office. The latest earthquake in Southeast Asia showed that Russia and China sent humanitarian missions to Myanmar and Thailand. The United States sent three humanitarian experts to Myanmar, who learned when they arrived that they had no more work with the Foreign Ministry. This is typical of what has become of the collapse of US -diplomatic efforts in the first hundred days.

Rubio has significantly weakened the department itself in what the mainstream media describes euphemistically as “shak-up”. In the so-called “shake-up”, the department of the department was reduced to $ 56 billion to $ 28 billion in half. The Foreign Ministry's budget budget is around 5% of the Pentagon budget. Rubio also ended the role of the department in human rights programs, war crimes surveillance and strengthened democratic institutions abroad. Rubio was a great supporter of these programs as a senator, but as an Akolyte of Donald Trump, he said he was in the department to reverse “decades of inflation and bureaucracy” and exterminated a deeply rooted “radical political ideology”. As part of his honorary duty by Trump, Rubio removed the office that focused on combating disinformation from Russia, China and Iran.

When Rubio was selected as Foreign Minister, he immediately moved up his positions in important matters in order to align with Donald Trump's views. Rubio had consistently praised the efforts of Ukraine to defend himself against a more powerful opponent, but in February he said that “it was exaggeration to believe that the Ukrainians would completely crush the Russian military.” Rubio previously emphasized that we have to help Ukraine “so that we are not undermined as unreliable and in our credibility.” After the confirmation, however, he added that we “have to do it in a way that does not empty us”. Rubio added that the participation of the United States in the self -defense of Ukraine was a “costly distraction from the efforts to contain China”.

Trump and Rubio are responsible for giving Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu an even freer hand to carry out genocidal attacks against the Palestinians. They state that Israeli attacks are carried out with “clairvoyance and justice” to ensure that the terrorist organization of Hamas never “threatens people in Israel again”. Rubio rejects all restrictions on military help for Israel and the restrictions of the extremist actions of the Jewish settlers in the West Bank. There is no longer a discussion in the Foreign Ministry about a two-state solution in the Middle East or another kind of solution.

Rubio's original plan called for the entire office for African affairs, but the Central Intelligence Agency was committed to reverse this decision by entering into the White House. Didn't Rubio know that African capitals lead locations for recruiting foreign assets? Without messages or consulates in Africa, it would be almost impossible for the CIA to support its agents in African capitals.

There is little direct communication between Trump and Rubio and certainly no love between the two men. They collapsed as rivals in the presidents' primary elections in 2016. Rubio called Trump a “dangerous fraudst”: Trump called Rubio a “total lightweight”. Both men were right … And both are responsible for reducing the influence of the United States on global diplomacy.