Marco Rubio Takes Aim at Globalists and the Left
In August, 2022, Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s then Prime Minister, travelled to Dallas in a bid to save “Western civilization.” The opening speech he delivered at that year’s Conservative Political Action Conference called for the defeat of “the globalist ruling class,” and urged greater coördination between nationalist forces on both sides of the Atlantic. Orbán offered his American audience a bit of advice from his many years in office, during which he had bullied civil society, stacked the judiciary, bent state media to his whims, and waged a relentless culture war against the left. “In order to win, it is not enough to know what you’re fighting for,” Orbán told the CPAC crowd. “You should also know how you should fight. My answer is: play by your own rules.”
Orbán’s winning run ended this April, in a landslide defeat in national elections, but his template for victory endures. The second term of President Donald Trump can be read as an exercise in speed-running through Orbán’s playbook, with the Administration attacking universities, chipping away at the independence of mainstream media outlets, and attempting to better gerrymander districts in favor of the Republican Party, among other things. Trump’s top lieutenants also evidently see themselves engaged in a profoundly ideological contest. In recent days, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has presided over a number of initiatives to combat perceived “anti-American” threats. Last week, he announced renewed efforts to unravel the International Criminal Court, which the State Department described in a press release as a “globalist” menace that represents “an intolerable threat to U.S. sovereignty.” He also convened a conference in Washington, attended by representatives from more than sixty nations, though few top diplomats, on the supposed danger of global “far-left” terrorism, and encouraged other governments to join the United States to help “crush this evil forever.” And, on Monday, the State Department issued a hundred-page report on Cuba that links communist-influence operations to protest movements, activists, and politicians in the country, including members of the Democratic Socialists of America and New York City’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani.
The timing for all this is curious. The Trump Administration—faced with plummeting approval ratings, a potential major electoral setback in the November midterms, and a war in the Middle East that it should never have started, doesn’t know how to end, and seems in the process of renewing—may be searching for new distractions to invigorate its base and occupy the news cycle. But Rubio’s gambits still reflect an agenda that has always animated this White House; the President started picking fights with the I.C.C. during his first term, while Rubio, a Cuban American with a large constituency from the same background in South Florida, has long dreamed of regime change in Havana. Taken together in the current moment, though, the moves point to a kind of intensification of MAGA’s illiberal project, a process that Rubio appears eager to lead.
Rubio put the I.C.C. on notice with a video message and an opinion piece published in the Wall Street Journal, and vowed to “systemically disable” it. The spur of Rubio’s ire may be the court’s ongoing war-crimes case against the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu; neither Israel nor the United States is a party to the Rome Statute that brought the court into being, in 2002, but Israel’s devastation of Gaza gives the court jurisdiction on the issue, since Palestine is a formal member. There’s an active I.C.C. warrant for Netanyahu’s arrest, which Mamdani, in a video posted on Tuesday evening, said that he wished to execute when the Israeli leader next comes to New York City, likely in September, but that he has no “legal authority” to do so independent of federal authorities. The Trump Administration attacked Mamdani for his stance. There are also campaigns from human-rights groups to get the court to consider war crimes against the United States for its strikes on alleged narco-traffickers in the Caribbean and on civilian targets in Iran, though no formal investigations, let alone charges, seem imminent. There was an investigation, launched in 2020, into alleged U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan, but the I.C.C. recently moved to “deprioritise” it. Generations of U.S. lawmakers have balked at allowing the I.C.C. jurisdiction over this country, but no official has embarked on such a sweeping attack on the institution as Rubio, who wants to expand existing anti-I.C.C. sanctions—which already include travel bans, asset freezes, and other restrictions on a number of I.C.C. personnel working on cases involving U.S. and Israeli nationals—and to pressure other nations to withdraw from the court altogether. Kenneth Roth, an American attorney and the former executive director of Human Rights Watch, told me that at stake could be the very principle of whether “governments control prosecution of crimes on their territory,” which he described as a basic element of justice. “The Trump Administration would have people believe that, if I commit a war crime in London, it somehow violates national sovereignty for Britain to allow the I.C.C. to prosecute me,” he said.
The targeting of the I.C.C. is part of the Trump Administration’s broader friction with major parts of the international system, which U.S. officials frequently argue is somehow rigged against American interests and beholden to “woke” agendas. It has pulled out of some United Nations treaties and agencies—including the Paris Climate Accords and the World Health Organization—while it is more broadly championing budget cuts across the U.N. and the streamlining or paring down of affiliated agencies and international organizations, as well as efforts to supplant them with its own initiatives, such as Trump’s quixotic Board of Peace. But the campaign to break the I.C.C., Stewart Patrick, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote, “is a campaign of pure destruction, a coercive attempt to impose the United States’ will on the rest of the world.” Prominent U.S. allies, including the French President, Emmanuel Macron, have spoken in defense of the I.C.C., and it’s unclear how much traction Rubio’s offensive will gain. John B. Bellinger III, a former legal adviser to the State Department during the George W. Bush Administration, sees the initiative “as a political message intended for a domestic audience.”
The same is true for the summit arranged by the State Department last week on the spectral menace of alleged far-left terrorist organizations. There, too, Rubio touted a campaign to “dismantle” his quarry—in this case, far-left activist networks that he sees as coördinating activities from Europe to the Americas. He suggested that “Antifa militants” are a graver threat than Islamist extremists, and summoned a history of left-wing violence primarily from the nineteen-seventies to make his argument. (Trump’s Justice Department, meanwhile, has quietly deleted a 2024 department study, which found far-right extremists were involved in far more ideologically motivated killings than their left-wing or Islamist counterparts.) Last year, the White House released a national-security memorandum about targeting “domestic terrorism,” which the American Civil Liberties Union described as “a fever dream of conspiracies” and “outright falsehoods” set up to target or suppress the work of myriad left-leaning activists, nonprofits, and their donors. Separately, the Trump Administration placed four European “Antifa” factions—two from Greece, one from Italy, and one from Germany—on its State Department foreign-terrorist-organizations list, a set of designations that left many European officials bemused, not least because of the lingering vagueness behind who or what even constitutes “Antifa.” At the conference, Rubio said that the left is “a distinctive and unique evil. It has always been driven by a hatred above all else, a hatred for civilization itself. It is a revolt of the worst against the best, a revolt of the weak and the cowardly against the strong and the good. It is perpetrated by those who cannot build, who cannot create, who cannot achieve great things, and take their revenge upon the world for their own inadequacy by seeking to destroy those who can.”
Critics of an Administration that pardoned the January 6th insurrectionists see this as shameless, cynical grandstanding. “We strongly urge the Department to return its focus to a serious mission set that is definitionally apolitical, data-driven, and rooted in reality,” a letter, which eleven Democratic lawmakers wrote to Rubio, said. You could read the Secretary of State’s ideological fervor as smoke from the fire of an Administration that’s eroding traditional checks and balances and using whatever coercive instruments it has to get its way, Roth said. “This is a lawless Administration, and that effort to put itself above the law manifests itself in various ways,” he said. Damian Murphy, the senior vice-president for national security and international policy at the Center for American Progress, a center-left think tank, warned that such rhetoric coming from the top echelons of U.S. leadership only “serves to embolden those illiberal actors who oftentimes use the guise of counterterrorism as a way to exert authoritarian control, which we’ve seen over and over in places like Russia, in places like China.” He also added that “our counterterrorism resources are finite. So when time and resources are spent targeting weak groups that pose little, if any, threat to the United States, it really calls into question the political motivations behind this effort.”
Rubio isn’t hiding his motivations in the Caribbean. In a post on X, he said that the State Department’s new Cuba report, which is titled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism,” presents a full accounting of Havana’s ties to American “radical leftism and Third Worldism” which “the American people deserve to know.” The report offers a potted history of the Communist regime’s influence campaigns, threading a needle between its early support of groups such as the Black Panthers to current “ties to powerful leftist nonprofits, anti-ICE collectives, socialist groups, and Marxist militant organizations across the United States.” The report can be read as another broadside against the American left, but it’s also part of the Trump Administration’s escalating approach to Cuba, which is under a punishing oil blockade and could yet face a U.S. military incursion. Michael Bustamante, a historian of Cuba at the University of Miami, told me that the report offers “a compendium of the greatest hits of allegations of Cuban subversion over time,” which, while not entirely inaccurate, is selective in its composition. He also noted the American right’s long tradition of attempting to scapegoat legitimate protest with accusations of foreign influence. “It’s not for nothing that organizations like the John Birch Society in the sixties used to see civil rights writ large as this kind of communist conspiracy with links to Havana and Moscow, and so it’s really sad to see that recirculated in this way, in this overly simplistic fashion,” he said.
The Administration’s opponents are troubled. In recent days, “Rubio has launched two equally ambitious campaigns—the first is a rejuvenated McCarthy Red Scare campaign at home to hunt down left-wing activists who oppose this Administration’s agenda, and the other is to align its allies at global scale toward this anti-left agenda,” David Adler, an American activist who is a co-coördinator of the Progressive International, a global network of left-wing political parties, unions, and movements, told me. He pointed to the Panamerican Congress, a summit of left-wing politicians and diplomats that will be held in Uruguay next month, as an example of burgeoning efforts to push back against Trump and Rubio’s apparent desire for hemispheric hegemony. (Representative Pramila Jayapal, a Democrat from Washington State, is expected to lead a U.S. delegation there.)
Whether Rubio’s campaigns prove effective is a separate matter. Opinion polls show the U.S.’s favorability under Trump at record lows around the world, including among its traditional allies. The White House’s blustering over Greenland and meddling in the Persian Gulf have also compelled European far-right factions otherwise in its camp to distance themselves from Trump’s policy goals and agenda. On the Continent, the Trump brand is toxic, even if Rubio’s rhetoric may find some sympathetic ears. In Budapest, Orbán, before his electoral defeat, announced his intention to pull Hungary out of the I.C.C., a gesture made with Netanyahu standing beside him and, it seems, likely coördinated with the Trump Administration. In May, Hungary’s new parliament voted to reverse that decision. Péter Magyar, Orbán’s rival and successor, has said that if Netanyahu returns to Hungary, his government would be obliged to take the Israeli leader into custody. ♦