Oh no! Marco Rubio is our new secretary of state. Since his views on world affairs are a toxic mix of anger, aggressiveness, ignorance, and arrogance, that’s terrible news. Or maybe not. Rubio won’t be the chief architect of American foreign policy. He may not even be in the room when President Trump makes important decisions.
Rubio’s opinions are not the reason he will be marginalized. The nature of the job has changed tremendously. For most of American history, the secretary of state has been the dominant shaper of American foreign policy. Those days are over. We are in the age of the incredible shrinking secretary of state. The job has not become purely ceremonial, but it’s headed that way.
President Trump has no love for the State Department — or, as he calls it, the “Deep State Department.” In his mind it is insular, hidebound, and full of lazy careerists and fuzzy-headed one-worlders. He is not inclined to listen to foreign service officers. It follows that he won’t pay too much attention to advice from his secretary of state.
Trump has named nearly a dozen “special envoys,” with more perhaps to come. A retired Army general is our new special envoy to Ukraine. A producer for the television series “The Apprentice,” which starred Trump, is special envoy to Britain. A former international banker is special envoy to Latin America — an especially painful slap for Rubio, since he considers that region his area of special expertise.
The Middle East gets not one but two envoys. One of them, the New York real estate developer Steven Witkoff, has already racked up a possible success by forcing Israel to accept a cease-fire deal. The other, Massad Boulos, father-in-law of Trump’s daughter Tiffany, has the title “senior adviser on Arab and Middle Eastern affairs.”
Most intriguing is the appointment of Richard Grenell, who was a highly controversial ambassador to Germany during Trump’s first term, as “presidential envoy for special missions.” Grennell had ambitions to be secretary of state, but why bother? Trump has assigned him to “work in some of the hottest spots around the world, including Venezuela and North Korea.” As one of the president’s favorites, he will have easy access to the Oval Office. Rubio, for whom Trump has shown little affection or admiration, may have to book appointments with White House gatekeepers.
The proliferation of special envoys throws diplomacy into upheaval. If there’s a special envoy for Ukraine, what is the ambassador’s job? If you’re the British prime minister, would you rather talk to the American ambassador or the President’s personal envoy? If two envoys are buzzing around the Middle East, what is the job of embassies other than issuing visas and helping American tourists replace their lost passports?
At the beginning of American history, secretaries of state were titans, among them Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, James Madison, and John Quincy Adams. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, many were less brilliant, but nearly all were dominant foreign policy makers. Presidents who refused to listen to them often got into trouble. If Woodrow Wilson had let his secretary of state lead peace talks after World War I instead of insisting on being the chief negotiator himself, the catastrophe of the Versailles Treaty, which led directly to World War II, might have been avoided.
The tradition of naming powerful secretaries of state continued into the Cold War years. George Marshall, Dean Acheson, and John Foster Dulles had enormous influence and helped shape the world. Since then, the job has steadily declined in importance.
One reason is the radically expanded power of the National Security Council. It was created in 1947 as a small advisory group but has ballooned to a staff of hundreds. When Henry Kissinger was President Nixon’s national security advisor, he had far more influence than Secretary of State William Rogers. President Clinton trotted out Secretary of State Warren Christopher on public occasions, but for advice he relied mainly on his old friend and schoolmate Strobe Talbott, who was officially Christopher’s subordinate. George W. Bush trusted his national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, more than Secretary of State Colin Powell — so much so that he made her secretary of state in his second term.
The last two secretaries of state who had real power and influence were George Shultz and James Baker, who served during the 1980s and ’90s. They were effective largely because foreign leaders recognized that when they spoke, they were speaking for the president. The same was true for the most effective secretary of state to serve since then, John Kerry, who had President Obama’s ear.
President Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, crystallizes the collapse of the job. He was a longtime Biden staffer and political operative with little diplomatic experience. The New York Times called him Biden’s “decades-long aide and surrogate son.” His main qualification was unfailing loyalty.
Secretary of state is an imposing title, but it doesn’t mean what it once did. Foreign leaders already understand that Rubio is not the man with whom they want to talk. They will be more likely to get what they want from Washington if they talk to a special envoy — or even a member of Trump’s family.
Diplomacy was long considered a specialized profession requiring skills that are honed over years of practice. Trump scorns that view. He won’t care much about what Rubio has to say. Neither should we.
Stephen Kinzer is a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.
