How Marco Rubio Can Save the State Department

Rubio Should Reconfigure the State Department for a 21st Century World: Secretary of State-designate Marco Rubio will likely sail through his confirmation hearings and is likely to take the helm of his department long before the Senate confirms his fellow cabinet members.

Frankly, he will need the time. Not only has his predecessor Antony Blinken been perhaps the most naïve and least effective secretary of State since Frank Kellogg a century ago,  but too many of his immediate predecessors have focused more on travel for travel’s sake than on managing an increasingly ossified and antiquated organization.

Simply put, the State Department is a largely nineteenth-century construction that expanded in the 20th century, but too often appears out-of-place for the 21st century.

A century ago, diplomats were not only representatives, but newsmen. They cabled back word of events to decision-makers in Washington who suddenly had a global perspective but had few sources of information. There was no CNN or MSNBC. Reuters relied on pigeon post until the mid-nineteenth century but, even after, it was primarily a wire service. Only in the 1960s, did it convert to wireless to expedite news and serve financial firms and newspapers. Within decades, cable and satellite television changed the information landscape again. Diplomats may still write and send cables, but seldom do they inform more than a common online newspaper would.

Nor do ambassadors have the same clout. The U.S. ambassadors in London, Paris, and Berlin are essentially party planners who enjoy free parking. If serious negotiations are afoot even farther afield, the secretary or president can call his counterpart in a matter of minutes. 

And, yet, the imprint of U.S. embassies and consulates remains largely unchanged. The United States retains consulates in Bordeaux, Lyon, Marseille, Rennes, and Strasbourg. Rennes has a population of 368,000, roughly the size of Cleveland, Ohio. The same pattern holds true with Canada, a neighbor and important trading partner, where the U.S. maintains consulates in Halifax (population 486,000) and Winnipeg (population 557,000), among other cities. Meanwhile, there are 46 cities in India with populations exceeding one million, only four of which have U.S. consulates. 

Africa is already a battleground for influence among great powers. President Joe Biden’s final trip abroad as president will be to Angola, where he will highlight the Lobito Corridor, an attempt to reorient Africa’s trade from the Indian Ocean Basin and China to the Atlantic Ocean and the United States.  The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the second largest country in Africa, has 70 percent of the world’s cobalt, a critical component for lithium batteries. In theory, in terms of wealth and impact on the global economy, the DRC could be the Saudi Arabia of the 21st century, if it were not for the corruption and misrule of incumbent President Félix Tshisekedi. While the U.S. embassy in Kinshasa can communicate with Tshisekedi and his cabal of cronies, consulates in Goma or Lubumbashi could better report on both regional insurgencies and Chinese penetration. 

Or consider Nigeria. On November 29, 2024, Biafra, the subject of a 1967-70 genocide, redeclared its independence from Nigeria with its capital at Ebube. Its action follows decades of discrimination against the ethnic Igbo and the region’s Christian and animist population, yet the State Department maintains no presence in the region, and so relies on the perpetrators of the Biafra genocide to speak on behalf of its victims. The lack of consulates along the Gulf of Guinea coast also makes it more difficult to monitor piracy, the oil trade, and Chinese influence. 

The same holds true for Somaliland, the world’s most likely new state. Briefly independent in 1960, the unrecognized country has run its own affairs since 1991. It orients itself to Taiwan while Somalia proper tilts toward Beijing, and Somaliland is a democracy while Somalia is a kleptocracy ruled over by a president selected by just a couple hundred clan elders. European and African countries maintain consulates or offices in the Somaliland capital Hargeisa, but the State Department operates blind. The same is true in Aden, the capital of the former (and perhaps future) South Yemen.

Then there is Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian Christian territory that Azerbaijan ethnically cleansed in September 2023. Satellite photos and sporadic visitors suggest that Azerbaijan is systematically erasing Armenian cultural heritage. An American consulate in Stepanakert could monitor the situation an pierce the gilded bubble that Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev seeks to construct.

With Turkish proxies if not troops invading northern Syria, a more permanent American diplomatic presence in Syrian Kurdistan would provide greater bang for the buck than, for example, than the U.S. consulate in Zurich, Switzerland, one of three U.S. outposts in the country.

Rubio knows the issues but if American diplomacy is going to matter, that is only half the battle. True, many Foreign Service Officers prefer Halifax to Hargeisa or Strasbourg to Srinigar, but they serve at the pleasure of the secretary and president. Their potential contribution to American national security should be paramount. Trump seeks to be a disruptor of the broader federal bureaucracy. Rubio’s greatest contribution could be as disruptor to a State Department bureaucracy firmly rooted in an increasingly irrelevant past.

About the Author: Dr. Michael Rubin 

Michael Rubin is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum. A former Pentagon official, Dr. Rubin has lived in post-revolution Iran, Yemen, and both pre- and postwar Iraq. He also spent time with the Taliban before 9/11. For more than a decade, he taught classes at sea about the Horn of Africa and Middle East conflicts, culture, and terrorism, to deployed US Navy and Marine units. Dr. Rubin is the author, coauthor, and coeditor of several books exploring diplomacy, Iranian history, Arab culture, Kurdish studies, and Shi’ite politics.