Rubio, the Trump Doctrine, and the State Department Reorg

The deranged left claims that President Donald Trump’s foreign policy is chaotic and has no broad goal. So it is good to see Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in a little-noticed 100-days statement, lay out the broad outlines of Trump’s foreign policy and thus his own department’s marching orders. Rubio managed to work in some “inside baseball” points as well, leaving clues as to how the State reorganization is proceeding.

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Rubio, speaking next to Trump in the Oval Office, began with the bottom line up front: American foreign policy is going to be about American goals, not some sort of global largesse.

This President inherited 30 years of foreign policy built around what was good for the world. The decisions we made as a government in trade and foreign policy were basically, is it good for the world and the global community? And under President Trump, we are making foreign policy based on is it good for America. What that means is foreign policy is about three things: Does it make America stronger? Does it make America safer? Does it make America richer? If something doesn’t do those three things—and hopefully all three things—we are not doing it.

This explains Rubio’s gutting of a whole vertical stack of State Department offices on his revised organizational chart whose names begin with the word “global,” such as the Office for Global Women’s Issues. The current foreign policy system was built primarily around two ideas: that it was America’s responsibility to right all wrongs in the world to its own liking, and competition with the Russians during the Cold War to gain leverage in the developing nations of Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia.

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The latter faded with the shifts of history (though the Cold Warriors lurking in government would love to revive the Cold War using China as the punching bag). The former morphed under a succession of presidencies into things like the U.S. scolding the world about human rights (while ignoring the dark stains on our society at home) and pressing social justice programs empowering women, LGBT people, and minorities around the world in tune with woke America. That was Hillary Clinton’s State Department.

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