Marco Rubio Outmatched

Dear reader,

As we stumble deeper into the Trump era, the journalism grows sharper and more discerning. This week we ran two superb pieces, one from Jonathan Winer on what exactly is happening with the court battles aimed at taming the president's broadside against the federal system, about which we'll discuss in a minute, and the other an unsettling and, well, undiplomatic assessment of the initial round of talks between the US and Russia over the future of Ukraine.

Carne Ross served in the British Foreign Service in Iraq, from which he resigned in protest. He was later the founder and executive director of Independent Diplomat. The following excerpt is from his new Substack column, which is also printed today in the Spectator.

“Among the many striking features of Trump’s appalling betrayal of Ukraine has been the gaucheness and utter naïveté of the Trump ‘team’s’ diplomacy. Observing the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, meet the new US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, in Saudi Arabia was like watching a leopard encounter a mouse.

I watched Lavrov eyeing him over the grandiose table in Riyadh as an easy snack. It didn’t help that Washington had already sold the farm to Russia by making basic negotiating errors - above all, giving away your concessions at the start by saying that:

a) it was time to make peace (when continued war does not serve Russia when it is losing vast quantities of men and equipment);

b) that in any peace deal Ukraine would have to give up territory (when the American and Ukrainian previous position was that Russia should leave all of Ukraine’s territory including Crimea) - according to the Trump twits, this concession is only being ‘realistic’;

c) that the US would not come to Ukraine’s military aid (the threat of which has always been a restraint on Russia, for instance the explicit threat of massive US conventional retaliation if the Russians ever used tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine);

d) not maintaining a consistent line (according to the New York Times, Rubio has been saying to European allies that in fact Trump doesn’t mean what he’s said about Ukraine - as if the Russians don’t read the New York Times;

e) undermining your own side by appearing to sideline the US envoy on Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, including by excluding him from the actual talks about the war, thus reducing your—much needed—ability to talk to multiple countries simultaneously, because now no one can trust what Kellogg (or indeed Rubio) says while America’s partners are forced to play the ludicrous game of working out what Trump really means;

f) excluding those countries on your side from the talks so that Russia only has to worry about one—rather idiotic—interlocutor (and of course it’s now clear that Trump’s regime and Europe are not in fact on the same side).

The Americans have also just given Russia a free cookie by refusing to include the word ‘aggression’ in a G7 statement about Ukraine, when that word has since the invasion been used by the G7 to describe Russia’s conduct.”

Meanwhile, at home, civil and political opposition to the lawless Trump regime is slowly forming. At the Spectator, we have worked both ends, that is we are trying to provide clarity around what is actually happening, and we are evaluating remedies and their potential for success. In addition to the cases already underway, which span a staggering range of constitutional and administrative violations, Jonathan Winer proposes greater reliance on a legal principle established in 1971 known as a Bivens Action, which would involve holding Trump administration officials personally responsible for the consequences of their actions.