Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s new plans to drastically shrink and reorganize the State Department arise from President Donald Trump's purported aims to enhance efficiency and put “America First.” They are, however, also likely to undermine many of Trump’s own stated goals — including peacefully solving global problems and countering China’s power.
Rubio’s plans, according to The Associated Press, include reducing staff in the U.S. by 15% and closing or consolidating more than 100 bureaus around the world. The downsizing and reorganization measures are targeted at, among other things, offices and programs devoted to promoting human rights and democracy. The Office of Global Women’s Issues, which the department’s website says had a “mandate to promote the rights and empowerment of women and girls through U.S. foreign policy,” has been eliminated.
Trump is signaling to the world that he's increasingly interested in using the threat of force instead of diplomacy to achieve his foreign policy aims.
As a prominent neoconservative U.S. senator, Rubio was once a staunch Republican critic of Trump’s so-called America First foreign policy. But he announced his broadside against a key component of the U.S.’ foreign policy machinery in a way that made him sound like Trump. Rubio described the State Department as “beholden to radical political ideology” and slammed the agency’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor as “a platform for left-wing activists to wage vendettas against ‘anti-woke’ leaders in nations such as Poland, Hungary, and Brazil and to transform their hatred of Israel into concrete policies such as arms embargoes.”
Before Rubio’s announcements, leaked draft memos reportedly suggested the State Department would be shuttering U.S. embassies across Africa. Rubio didn’t announce anything that radical, but this is the first stage of the overhaul at State, and more cuts across the international workforce are possible. According to The Washington Post, State Department officials “left open the possibility that far greater downsizing could occur — affecting, potentially, tens of thousands of the department’s 80,000 employees globally and numerous U.S. consulates and facilities abroad.” Brett Bruen, a former State Department official in the Obama administration, told the Post that the cuts are “designed to satiate the DOGE demand for cuts, irrespective of the damage to American interests.”
By slashing the State Department at the same time as promising a record-breaking $1 trillion budget for the Pentagon, Trump is signaling to the world that he's increasingly interested in using the threat of force instead of diplomacy to achieve his foreign policy aims. It’s an odd approach from “the ultimate peace president” who had pledged to strike diplomatic deals to resolve global conflicts and has defended the idea of robust diplomacy with rivals and adversaries to help ward off war and famine.
Slashing State doesn't just reveal a troubling inconsistency — it opens up a valuable opportunity for China, Trump’s chief geopolitical rival and fixation, to augment its influence. While we don’t yet know the details of all the ways the State Department is going to be cut, reducing staff and influence operations will generally leave a vacuum for China to exploit as the two superpowers vie for access to natural resources and infrastructure with partner countries around the world.
In other words, Trump can’t withdraw from engaging with the world and pursue an “America First” policy agenda at the same time. If he wants to pursue U.S. interests across the globe, ensure the country’s economic primacy and reduce the likelihood of global conflicts, then he needs to engage with the world. Diplomatic efforts would be far more “efficient” than trying to achieve the country’s goals using the barrel of a gun.
