Thread by @michaeldweiss

I read everything Dexter Filkins writes and so should you. His profile of Marco Rubio is no exception. I'll share a few highlights in this thread:

During the campaign I said J.D. Vance seemed like the sort of populist redneck a gaggle of South African tech bros might cook up in a Silicon Valley laboratory. Almost AI-generated. Anti-charismatic. Awkward in the extreme. And a hard sell absent the Trump juggernaut. Well, lookee here. Vance is not "a guy's guy" like Rubio. Trump thinks he's a bit weird, a bit wussy, and highly unlikeable. He even has buyer's remorse picking Vance as VP. The Maduro op and the past and future military action Iran show Marco's stock is up, J.D.'s is down. Vance gets to own the mess in Minnesota. Rubio gets to be viceroy of Caracas.

Here's a little something special from Sen. Mike Rounds, who not only confirms Rubio's call to his former Senate colleagues at the Halifax Security Forum last November, but emphasizes that the Dmitriev-Witkoff plan was really the Dmitriev plan: "... we are the recipients of a proposal that was delivered to one of our representatives." Indeed. And it was laundered, Rounds might have added, through a gullible press corp, which relied on Dmitriev, Witkoff and Kushner as sources (this when Witkoff played an active role in deceiving the same press corp about supposed daylight between Trump and Netanyahu on striking Iran) and didn't bother asking why the Secretary of State/NSA or CIA director were written out of a coalescing U.S. deal with Russia. Those sorts of things demand inter-agency buy-in. Instead, amateur diplomats made an end-run around the actual diplomat, and Rubio got his retaliation in by letting a group of bipartisan legislators do it for him. He then initiated a de-Russification process of Dmitriev's 28-point plan in Geneva, and lo and behold it's now a Ukrainian-coauthored 20-point plan, certified by Witkoff and Kushner and Trump in successive rounds in Florida. The Russians will inevitably reject it and more or less have already. This was very well played.

There are two prevailing views of what Rubio represents in this administration. The first is that he sold his soul to MAGA and became an enthusiastic executioner of Trump's agenda. All spheres of influence and gimme gimme militarism. Gone is the internationalism of the pre-Trump era Republican. Anakin gave in to the Dark Side and became Darth Vader. The second view is that Rubio sold his soul to MAGA but still tries to blunt the edges of Trump's agenda and even sneaks in some of his old foreign policy agenda whilst somehow staying in Trump's good graces -- Thomas Cromwell in the Tudor court or a wily Politburo member trying to survive the purges. Going after Maduro but making it about oil and narco-terrorism rather than democracy and human rights is one way to do it. Praising Trump to the point of narcolepsy and quietly preempting the wholesale forfeiture of Ukrainian territory to a weakened Russia is another way.

Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine's former foreign minister (and a keen student of U.S. politics as I discovered when I met him in Kyiv), sees Rubio as a bulwark against this administration's worst pro-Kremlin tendencies. Kuleba is not alone.

The Europeans, perhaps a little too wishfully, agree with this assessment. They are trying to mitigate the damage the U.S. is doing to transatlanticism and NATO and the European Union and can't afford to adopt the oppositional stance of American political actors. This frustrates many in America's commentariat, myself included sometimes. But one understands their imperative. They reckon this White House is better with Rubio in it than not. Meanwhile, career Foreign Service types and Democrats who got on with Rubio in the Senate and voted to confirm him as Secretary of State see only a cynical opportunist who gutted USAID, betrayed Venezuelan dissidents by cozying up to Rodriguez, and is maybe about to sign off on the illegal annexation of Greenland. The Second Coming of John McCain this is not.

Finally, here is another oft-heard observation about Rubio. Some of the worst decisions made in his ever-expanding fiefdoms (hiring a racist lunatic Duginist to gut the Global Engagement Center, sanctioning former EU officials and disinformation experts, possibly granting visas to Duma deputies to make Rep. Ana Paulina Luna look even more of a twit than she already does) are said to be compromises he has had to make to remain within the good graces of the MAGA ideologues and to keep his own preferred functionaries from being ousted. Rubio's relationship with Susie Wiles here is key. And it's no coincidence he was one of the few figures she didn't disparage in that Vanity Fair piece.