What was Marco Rubio thinking? That was one of the many questions swirling around Washington after last Friday’s disastrous meeting in the Oval Office between President Donald Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, alongside anticipation of an agreement to bring about the end of Russia’s war with Ukraine.
As Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance engaged in an increasingly tense conversation with Zelensky while the White House press pool watched, Rubio sat next to Vance in silence, his body rigid, his face stony and indecipherable. Speculation about Rubio’s inner thoughts ran rampant on the internet afterward, even making its way into Saturday Night Live’s opening sketch lampooning the meeting. “Look at Rubio over there, fully dissociating,” said actor James Austin Johnson’s Trump.
But for several advisers and supporters who have followed Rubio since his first days in the Senate, it’s no mystery. The new secretary’s idle watch and subsequent defense of Trump’s approach with Zelensky was another disheartening reminder of how far he has strayed from his original hawkish, Reagan-esque views on foreign policy. Now, as multiple former advisers have complained to me, Rubio looks like a mere bystander, a steward for a foreign policy of retrenchment that was once antithetical to his own.
“It’s an incredible disappointment,” said Eric Edelman, a former ambassador and high-level Pentagon official who was among those named to Rubio’s list of national security advisers to his 2016 presidential campaign. “This has been a long evolution, I would say. And you know, here we’ve arrived at this point … it’s sort of indistinguishable from full on Trumpism.”
Rubio made clear that lack of distinction in a pair of TV interviews following Friday’s Oval Office meeting. On CNN Friday night, just hours after the meeting, he presented himself as a dutiful agent of President Trump’s foreign policy.
“At this moment, as secretary of state, my job working for the president is to deliver peace, to end this conflict and end this war,” he told anchor Kaitlan Collins. “It’s an unsustainable, bloody war that has to come to an end, and right now, the only leader in the world that can even have a chance of bringing about an end to this is named President Donald Trump. And we need to give him the opportunity to try to do that.”
And on Sunday, in an interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s This Week, Rubio cast the decision facing the United States as one between supporting a protracted, unwinnable war or negotiating for peace with Russia.
“The sooner everyone grows up around here and figures out that this is a bad war that’s heading in a bad direction with death and destruction and all kinds of dangers surrounding it that can spiral into a broader conflict, the sooner people grow up and realize that, I think the more progress we’re going to be able to make,” he said, with more than a flash of frustration at the administration’s critics.
For the hawks who once supported and worked for him, Rubio’s turn toward a Trumpian realism is all the more frustrating because of a sense that the former Florida senator knows better. What they saw in Rubio’s blank expression at the White House on Friday was perhaps recognition that this was not what the once-proud Reaganite had signed up for.
“There’s still, I think, maybe a part of him that understood how bad this was,” Edelman said of Rubio’s reaction to the Zelensky meeting.
While Rubio’s foreign policy eye has always been aimed more toward China and Latin America than to Europe, the 53-year-old Florida Republican had long been outspoken about the nature of Vladimir Putin and Russia’s designs on regional influence. In a speech in 2015, not long after declaring his candidacy for president, Rubio called Putin a “gangster” and an “organized crime figure who controls a government and a large territory.” He also named Russia as one of the top foreign adversaries of the United States. Even after Trump’s election in 2016, Rubio staked out independence from the new president by declaring Russia a “threat to global stability.”
More generally, his new support for Trumpism on the global stage-–where personal relations between leaders matter more than idealistic principles—starkly diverges from the foreign-policy vision Rubio espoused nearly 10 years ago in a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations. Arguing for a values-based approach to foreign relations, Rubio proclaimed that America’s power came not just from its capabilities but its “superior aims.” And he went after the Obama administration for failing to recognize how America’s moral leadership defines its global leadership.
“In recent years, the ideals that have long formed the backbone of American foreign policy—a passionate defense of human rights, the strong support of democratic principles and the protection of the sovereignty of our allies—these values have been replaced by at best caution, and at worst, an outright willingness to betray those values for the expediency of negotiations with repressive regimes,” Rubio said.
But that was the old Rubio, and the old Republican party consensus on foreign policy. In 2025, Rubio’s words on CNN Friday reflect the true north star of the GOP: Trump’s moral relativism.
“I’m not going to fall into this trap of who’s bad and who’s evil,” Rubio said. Like many who signed up with him at the time, the Rubio who was running for president a decade ago would have been appalled.
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