Josh Keating

Well, in a way, he did it by not being Marco Rubio. He kind of... abandoned everything that he, or much of what he has stood for in the past, endeared himself to Trump, supported the president vocally and through policy changes, and just, you know, earn the president's trust.

I will also say it's also kind of hard to get into the Trump circle. There's not a lot of people who meet the loyalty test. And Rubio has proven that he can do that. The reason that it's important to point this out is because when he took the initial position of secretary of state, many people viewed him as one of the weakest in Trump's orbit.

I wrote an entire column about how all these people in town were saying, he is not going to last very long. He won't last even six months as Secretary of State. And so the fact that he has climbed the ranks and taken all these positions and earned the president's trust in such a way, that is really remarkable.

But it just goes to show how unrecognizable he is compared to what Marco Rubio was, you know, five, ten years ago.

Well, you know, Rubio is, I wouldn't say he's like a traditional, traditional Republican. Like he kind of came in on a wave of reactionariness to the establishment. But he, over time, established his bona fides in the Senate as a hawkish Republican, pro-human rights, pro-democracy promotion.

Definitely pro-humanitarian assistance.

The type of guy who supported Ukraine.

wants to be tough on dictatorships around the world, including Iran. And he ran against President Trump in 2016 for the presidency. And the president, Trump back then, nicknamed him.

But I would say he also has proven to be a very flexible type of politician. Over the last several years, he has moderated his positions. My understanding is he's gone out and learned a lot about the American heartland. He's from Florida. And he's a little bit more of a restrainer than he was in the past. But, you know, now that he has joined—

the Trump team, he has really gone to the MAGA world to the point where even like far right influencers like Laura Loomer are now praising Marco Rubio.

Just would not have happened, honestly, even a couple of years ago. I mean, it really shows how far the transition of Marco Rubio, the change has really accelerated since he has joined the Trump administration.

Yes. And part of the reason that that has happened is because he's used that perch to, first of all, totally agree very vocally with a lot of Trump policies, right? In defending, for instance, President Trump's takedown of Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky in that famous Oval Office meeting that we will all you know, dream about for the rest of our lives.

He looked like he was sinking into the couch. But afterward, he got on TV, he went public, he defended the president. He realized immediately, okay, I have to speak out or it's going to look like I'm not supportive of President Trump and I have to be subordinate to him. Look, another area where he's really, really been like, astonishingly pro-Trump is the anti-immigration stuff.

And this is really remarkable for Rubio because he has often touted his own family's immigrant story. They're from Cuba.

And now he is seemingly gleefully stripping students of their visas and... You know, negotiating deals that are sending people to a prison in El Salvador without them getting proper hearings in court. And he's even suggesting he'll defy the judges if they request information in support of Trump.

So it's like some of these things you think, wow, does he have to go this far? But obviously it's working for him in terms of surviving under Trump. But who knows? Like a month from now, Marco Rubio may be out of favor. you just don't really know what's going to happen. I think a lot of people thought that Mike Waltz, the national security advisor who was pushed out, would last longer than he did.

So now that Rubio is actually in charge of these key portfolios, national security advisor and the State Department, in a way he has a bigger target on his back too, right? Because he's going to be responsible for any major crisis that happens.

So the national security advisor is based at the White House, and they basically are kind of like a point guard. They keep an eye on what all the agencies are thinking. They coordinate things. And they bring together options for the president when it comes to foreign policy and national security issues.

Now, that's if they kind of do it in the way that's considered proper, which is to be an honest broker, to be the guy that says, look, here's what state is thinking. Here's what DOD is thinking. Here's what the CIA wants. A lot of national security advisors acquire more power than that. They very much have their own points of view. They do their own negotiations.

They kind of rival other people in the administration for power. And that's kind of always caused a bit of tension in past administrations. So, you know, we definitely could have seen like Rubio at odds with a national security advisor in the future. But now it would be like being at odds with himself.

Look, one of the key mysteries right now is how is he going to do both jobs, right, at the same time? And remember, he has two other jobs, but let's put those aside. So how he splits his time is going to be something that's going to be very important to watch. The only person who's done this in the past is Henry Kissinger. And that was in the 70s.

And back then, you know, the world was, to be honest, not as complicated. Not that it was great, but it was not what we have now.

Look, I think if he survives in the roles for several months or over a year, that is an accomplishment. Under President Trump, survival is difficult. He has a constant turnover in the past. In terms of other accomplishments, look, whether it is as National Security Advisor or Secretary of State or the National Archivist, for all I know,

If this administration were to strike important deals with Iran, say over its nuclear program, or bring about some sort of a peace between Russia and Ukraine, these are things that they can point to as accomplishments. I do want to point out there is another major player in terms of foreign policy right now, and that's Steve Witkoff. He's a special envoy for the president.

He's actually the lead on portfolios like Iran and Ukraine. But Rubio now in particular can very much have a major role in those as well. And ultimately, look, ultimately, the president is the one who's going to take the credit for the accomplishments. And knowing how Rubio is operating, he will definitely see the limelight to the president.

There's been some coverage that's mentioned him as potentially a candidate for the Trump administration's envoy to Ukraine. So he could be somebody who's like very closely involved in this.

And whenever you're in a negotiation, you want to be in the best position possible when you start from that negotiation. You don't have to have written the art of the deal to know that you want to move into talks from a position of strength. And I think that there's clearly a desire that if... Ukraine and Russia are pressured into a position where they're talking about territorial concessions.

You want Ukraine to be controlling as much territory as they can before those talks start.

Yeah, I mean, we're in this awkward period right now where there are basically two U.S. presidents. Foreign actors, international actors, have to deal with both of those realities. They have to press their advantage as much as they can with the team that's there now and also position themselves for the one that's coming in.

And we have seen this before, especially when one administration is handing off a war to to the next one. One example you could look at is the transition from Harry Truman to Dwight Eisenhower when the Korean War was going on.

Eisenhower had promised to end the war, which by that point had become very unpopular, but he hadn't quite spelled out on the campaign trail how he was going to do it. And this really annoyed Truman, who had basically made the argument, hey, but if you know how to end the war, could you please share that with us? We'd like to end the war before we leave office.

And Eisenhower made this famous pledge. He said, I shall go to Korea to basically, you know, assess the situation on the ground and figure out how to end it.

And he went and had a fact-finding mission and came to the conclusion the war wouldn't be winnable with another big offensive, which is what the South Koreans and what hawks in the U.S. wanted. And he basically continued the armistice talks that Truman had started. And a few months after he took office, that war did finally end.

Sometimes we've seen the incoming administration actually kind of stymie or sabotage the efforts of the outgoing one.

In 1968, the Nixon campaign basically reached out to the South Vietnamese negotiators and told them not to agree to a deal that would end the war in Vietnam and would presumably give the outgoing Johnson administration a big win and make the Democrats look good in that election.

And so the war actually ended up continuing for another few years with, you know, a lot more casualties, Americans and Vietnamese.

And then, you know, a final example we could talk to is a more recent one, is the war in Afghanistan.

Donald Trump agreed to the deal with the Taliban that led to the withdrawal of U.S. troops. And the withdrawal actually began before the Biden administration came in.

Biden probably would have wanted to get those troops out anyway, but I think would have preferred to negotiate it on his own terms.

And it's actually interesting if you look at how Trump talks about that now. He's criticized Biden quite a bit for how the withdrawal was handled, including, you know, the terrorist attack that could, you know, kill people, including a number of U.S. troops.

But, you know, I think all these examples just go to show you can talk about, you know, conditions on the battlefield, the weapons each side has, but, you know, these U.S. elections are themselves kind of developments in the war, and they affect the strategy that all sides in the conflict are pursuing.

Yeah, well, I'm going to steal an argument from Sam Green, a really smart Russia analyst, who his basic point was that Putin up until this point has managed to use uncertainty to his advantage and use the fact that he's the most unpredictable character in this drama to his advantage. He's no longer the most unpredictable character. I'll keep you in suspense.

You know, Trump's coming in and Putin may not be able to sort of leverage uncertainty about, you know, just how crazy he is, just how much he's willing to escalate this to his advantage to quite the same extent, because now there's somebody who prides himself on being, you know, the potentially craziest guy in the room. That's not me saying that.

That's Trump has actually like talked about his approach and framed it that way. I think it's pretty clear that, that the Trump team is gonna push for negotiations. Will that work, though? It's possible Russia may just say no. They may say, we're winning on the battlefield. We're walking away from this.

In which case, you know, Trump has said that he would tell Putin like he's just going to give Zelensky everything right now. He's going to send him all the weapons, let him do whatever he wants. So I don't think it's out of the question. This could actually end with the U.S. escalating its involvement in the war in Ukraine.

And then there's the question, you know, what does a deal actually look like? You can say we want to freeze the lines in place. I think there is a consensus developing that this is going to end with some current internationally recognized Ukrainian territory held by Russia. But the Ukrainians are going to want security guarantees.

They don't want a repeat of the deals they've made in the past where they've sort of agreed to ceasefires with Russia and then Russia's violated them. And so, you know, they say they want full membership in NATO. That, to be honest, seems unlikely. But so then what does security guarantees look like? You know, is it... basing Western troops in Ukraine?

Is it, you know, providing them with a lot more military aid? If they don't get that, I could see the Ukrainians just walking away from the deal saying, we're going to keep fighting with whatever we have. We shouldn't assume that, you know, this war is going to end just because Donald Trump wants it to.

I think it has a lot to do with the election. President Trump has come in, said he wants to push for negotiations to end the war. And I think what we see from both sides is an attempt to press their advantage before they're pushed by the new U.S. administration into some kind of talks.

So the last tranche of Ukraine aid was allocated by Congress last April.

That was $61 billion. And basically, they're trying to rush whatever they can out the door before Inauguration Day. So they're trying to get all these contracts in place, get as much aid moving to Ukraine now as they can. The incoming Trump administration does seem to be sort of irritated by this.

We saw Richard Grenell, who was the former Trump administration ambassador to Germany, a real kind of like sharp elbowed, you know, you know. Troll, basically, a guy who talks a lot of smack on social media and did so even when he was a diplomat. He's accused the Biden administration on Twitter of escalating the war before he leaves office.