February 13, 2026

Marco Rubio Is Rebooting the Neocons for the MAGA Era

By: Chris Kennedy

This article was originally published in Bloomberg.

In his infamous guide to ruling, Niccolò Machiavelli also offers a warning to ambitious advisers: Power belongs to the prince. Those who attempt to channel that power for their own purposes may not be able to control the outcome — and won’t last long in court. During President Donald Trump’s first term, numerous foreign policy aides learned this lesson the hard way, including George W. Bush-era neoconservative holdovers who sought to channel the mercurial president’s instincts into a more familiar orthodoxy. They could not. Trump jettisoned adviser after adviser, and by the end of 2020 we still didn’t have a clear MAGA foreign policy vision — aside from a consistent opposition to the post-World War II consensus.

Rubio learned from the first term: If you want to maintain influence in a Trump administration, you must get on board, and you can’t equivocate.

During the Joe Biden years, a new ecosystem of “America First” thinkers emerged to fill the gap, attempting to recast Trump’s transactionalism as a modern, pragmatic realism. The neocons were nowhere to be seen, and by the time Trump retook the presidency in 2025, the conclusion from most on the right was that the neoconservative project was dead. Enter Marco Rubio, Trump’s secretary of state and national security adviser, and a figure long associated with the more hawkish wing of the Republican Party. He has defied early skeptics who believed him ill-fitted to an “America First” foreign policy and has emerged as one of Trump’s most powerful advisers.

More from CNAS

View All Reports View All Articles & Multimedia