Marco Rubio: A traditionalist hawk in the age of Trump

When Marco Rubio first launched his presidential campaign in 2015, the then-senator championed a tough stance on Russia and decried previous efforts by United States officials to reset and bolster ties with Moscow.

Ten years later, Rubio – now America’s top diplomat – sat across from his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov in Saudi Arabia this week in a bid to revive relations between Washington and Moscow.

A foreign policy hawk who once called Russian President Vladimir Putin a “thug”, Rubio is now overseeing seismic shifts in the US approach to the world under President Donald Trump.

Rubio is seen as a conventional politician, with traditional conservative views. He is now serving in an administration whose public face is a tech billionaire with no previous political experience who is looking to radically hollow out federal agencies.

The new secretary of state, meanwhile, finds himself pushing Trump’s unconventional international agenda: opening up to Russia, taking over the Panama Canal, acquiring Greenland, and “owning” Gaza.

Global stage, ambition

Analysts say Rubio is motivated by a conviction that the US should play the leading role on the world stage as well as personal ambitions that saw him seek the presidency in the 2016 elections and rise through the ranks of the Republican Party.

“He has a very traditional, hawkish view of America’s role in the world, but we’ve also seen ways in which he’s simply dispensed with long-held views since becoming secretary of state,” said Michael Hanna, US programme director at the International Crisis Group think tank.

Approving the gutting of international aid programmes and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) is one glaring example of Rubio’s own shifts.

Rubio has long been an advocate of aid programmes, promoting them as a facet of American soft power in the world.