What on earth is Donald Trump thinking? That’s what many realists and restrainers inside and out of Washington are asking themselves after news broke late last night that Marco Rubio, the senior senator from Florida, is set to be tapped as secretary of state in the next administration.
The reactions haven’t been uniformly bad, mind you. Other candidates rumored to be under consideration, such as Vivek Ramaswamy, caused many in the US foreign policy elite to wretch in fear. Others, like former national security advisor Robert O’Brien and Senator Bill Hagerty, who served as US ambassador to Japan during Trump’s first term, would have been predictable choices with whom most could live.
Rubio, however, is one of the most hawkish options Trump could have picked. Combined with the tapping of Mike Waltz as national security advisor and Elise Stefanik as US ambassador to the United Nations, the senior ranks of Trump’s foreign policy team thus far look mightily different from the loose “end wars, negotiate peace” framework the president referenced repeatedly on the campaign trail.
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