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 make it through his confirmation hearings and take charge of his department long before the Senate confirms his Cabinet colleagues.

Honestly, he’ll need the time. Not only was his predecessor, Antony Blinken, perhaps the most naive and least effective secretary of state since Frank Kellogg a century ago, but too many of his immediate predecessors were more focused on travel for the sake of travel than on running an increasingly ossified and antiquated organization.

Simply put, the State Department is largely a 19th-century structure that was expanded in the 20th century but all too often seems out of place in the 21st century.

A century ago, diplomats were not only representatives but also journalists. They reported the events by telegram to decision-makers in Washington, who suddenly had a global perspective but few sources of information. There was no CNN or MSNBC. Until the mid-19th century, Reuters relied on postal mail, but even then it remained primarily a news service. It wasn’t until the 1960s that a switch to wireless communications was made to distribute news and serve financial companies and newspapers. Within decades, cable and satellite television changed the information landscape again. Diplomats still write and send telegrams, but rarely provide more information than a regular online newspaper.

Even ambassadors do not have the same influence. The US ambassadors in London, Paris and Berlin are essentially party planners who like free parking. If serious negotiations are taking place even at a greater distance, the secretary or president can call his counterpart within minutes.

And yet the character of US embassies and consulates remains largely unchanged. The United States maintains consulates in Bordeaux, Lyon, Marseille, Rennes and Strasbourg. Rennes has a population of 368,000, about the size of Cleveland, Ohio. The same pattern applies to Canada, a neighbor and important trading partner, where the United States maintains consulates in Halifax (pop. 486,000) and Winnipeg (pop. 557,000), among others. There are now 46 cities in India with more than a million residents, only four of which have US consulates.

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

Or think of Nigeria. On November 29, 2024, Biafra, a victim of genocide in 1967–70, re-declared its independence from Nigeria, with its capital at Ebube. His action follows decades of discrimination against the region’s ethnic Igbo and Christian and animist populations. Yet the State Department has no presence in the region and therefore relies on the perpetrators of the Biafra genocide to speak on behalf of the victims. The lack of consulates along the Gulf of Guinea coast also makes it difficult to monitor piracy, oil trade and Chinese influence.

The same goes for Somaliland, the world’s most likely new state. The unrecognized country, which briefly gained independence in 1960, has been managing its own affairs since 1991. It is modeled on Taiwan while Somalia leans toward Beijing, and Somaliland is a democracy while Somalia is a kleptocracy ruled by a president chosen by just a few hundred clan elders. European and African countries maintain consulates or offices in the Somali capital Hargeisa, but the Foreign Ministry operates blindly. The same applies to 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 and break the golden bubble that Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev wants to create.

With Turkish proxies, if not troops, invading northern Syria, a more permanent American diplomatic presence in Syrian Kurdistan would offer better value for money than, say, the U.S. consulate in Zurich, Switzerland, one of three U.S. outposts in the country.

Rubio knows the problems, but if American diplomacy is to matter, that’s only half the battle. While many Foreign Service officers prefer Halifax to Hargeisa or Strasbourg to Srinagar, they serve at the pleasure of the Secretary and the President. Their potential contribution to U.S. national security should be of utmost importance. Trump is trying to disrupt the general federal bureaucracy. Rubio’s greatest contribution may be to disrupt the State Department’s bureaucracy, which is 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. As a former Pentagon official, Dr. Rubin lived in Iran after the revolution, in Yemen and in Iraq before and after the war. He also spent time with the Taliban before 9/11. For more than a decade, he taught courses at sea to deployed U.S. Navy and Marine units on the Horn of Africa and Middle East conflicts, culture and terrorism. Dr. Rubin is the author, co-author and co-editor of several books on diplomacy, Iranian history, Arab culture, Kurdish studies and Shia politics.