On Tuesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio met his Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The meeting was the first such interaction between Russia and the United States since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Rubio, accompanied by Middle East special envoy Steve Witkoff and National Security Advisor Michael Waltz, talked to Lavrov and other high-level Russian officials for four hours. No representatives from Ukraine or Europe were invited to the meeting.
Speaking with reporters after the meeting, Rubio outlined a “multitrack” process that would normalize diplomatic relations between the United States and Russia, convene a “high-level team” to work on ending the conflict in Ukraine, and explore what Rubio called “the incredible opportunities that exist to partner with the Russians, geopolitically on issues of common interest, and frankly economically on issues that hopefully will be good for the world.” Although vague on the sequencing, Rubio at one point stated that “all three of those efforts will be happening in conjunction with one another,” but noted that the diplomatic steps would happen quickly.
Rubio said that he “came away today convinced that [the Russians] are willing to begin to engage in a serious process” to end the war.” Yet the United States and its intelligence partners have seen no evidence that Putin is interested in serious negotiations.
The optics and the substance of the meeting amounted to giving away the store before the real talks begin. To state the obvious, this is not how effective diplomacy works – and there’s a mountain of research that shows why.
Talking in war can be dangerous
Conventional wisdom has it that talking is always good, even in wartime. Why not try to make peace?
As a new book by international relations scholar Eric Min demonstrates, however, talking in wartime can be very dangerous. In Words of War, Min argues that countries are very savvy in weighing the costs and benefits of negotiating when they consider when to come to the table. Some belligerents may be sincere in seeking peace. Others may want to shift blame or buy time to regroup or replenish their military forces. Talking, then, can sometimes be a tool of conflict, and actually prolong war.
Min also adds another variable to this picture: external pressure from a third party. In the post-1945 world, institutions and norms often helped bring warring parties to the negotiating table, partly by lowering the risk that accepting an invitation to talk would make a belligerent look weak. The problem is that external pressure can get warring countries in a room, but it can’t make governments sincere in their desire to make a deal for a lasting peace. So, as Min concludes, external pressure often leads to more talks, but not necessarily sincere talks.
Trump is fine letting Russia drive the talks – without Ukraine
In the case of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Trump administration is trying to serve as this source of external pressure. But if the U.S. intelligence assessment (and that of most outside observers) is correct, and Putin has no interest in a lasting peace deal, then bringing Putin to the table would only allow him time to regroup his forces – and give him a platform to reiterate Kremlin talking points.
Indeed, in his remarks after the Riyadh talks, Lavrov complained about a Ukrainian drone strike on an oil pumping station in Russia, which illegally invaded Ukraine in 2022 and which frequently targets Ukraine’s civilian energy infrastructure. Speaking of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Lavrov said, “this man and his entire team should be calmed down, given a slap on the wrist.” Lavrov called these talks with the United States a “very useful conversation.”
It’s a conversation that’s happening without Ukraine or Europe. Cutting out the country whose fate hangs in the balance raises echoes of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt negotiating Europe’s carve-up with Josef Stalin at the Yalta conference of 1945 – for which the GOP criticized FDR for decades. Many observers have suggested what Putin really wants is “Yalta 2.0.”
Of course, if you are going to negotiate behind the backs of those who are directly affected by peace talks, it helps to … negotiate. Trump’s team hasn’t helped by appearing to give away the store ahead of time. Before Rubio appeared in Riyadh, newly installed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, in his maiden speech on foreign soil, went to a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group in Brussels – and stated that it would be “unrealistic” for Ukraine to return to its pre-2014 borders. While most observers expect Ukraine will have to make some territorial concessions for peace, Hegseth’s statement drew an immediate rebuke from the GOP chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Roger Wicker (R-Miss.). Wicker supported Hegseth’s confirmation but called his Munich comments a “rookie mistake,” saying “everybody knows … you don’t say before your first meeting what you will agree to and what you won’t agree to.”
Rubio’s comments about working on a “multitrack” basis with Russia to quickly restore diplomatic relations and explore future economic and geopolitical cooperation, while trying to get a peace deal, appear to be picking up the relay baton from Hegseth.
Trump gave Putin a free gift
Even if Riyadh wasn’t quite Yalta 2.0, Putin already won something big: The pictures of his foreign minister sitting at the diplomatic table with the U.S. secretary of state. Far from an international pariah, Russia now seems on a clear path to regular attendance at high-level diplomatic meetings. Even more important to Putin is the sense that Russia is back on equal footing with the United States – and is an equal player in deciding the fate not only of Ukraine, but of Europe.
Thus, the press coverage from the Riyadh meetings is not just a first step, but a huge leap toward that goal – and those photos cost Putin nothing.
It is worth noting that Saudi Arabia Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, better known as MBS, also scored a priceless victory at no cost. Playing diplomatic host is a far cry from the near-pariah status he faced after agents of his government killed journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey in 2018. The CIA concluded in November 2018 that MBS personally ordered the killing.
In the Khashoggi case, Republican senators rebuked Trump’s handling of the journalist’s murder, when the president sided with Saudi Arabia and sent Secretary of Defense James Mattis to make a public statement that there was “no smoking gun” evidence linking MBS to the killing.
One of those senators was Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who said in a December 2018 interview on CNN that “We don’t need direct evidence that he ordered the code red on this thing…. The bottom line is that there is no way that 17 people close to him got a charter plane, flew to a third country, went into a consulate, killed and chopped up a man, and flew back, and he didn’t know about it, much less order it.” In an earlier CNN interview, just weeks after the Khashoggi murder, Rubio said the United States would “lose our credibility and our moral standing to criticize [Russian President Vladimir] Putin for murdering people…. We can’t say anything about that if we allow Saudi Arabia to do it and all we do is a diplomatic slap on the wrist.” Rubio said that “human rights is worth blowing [the U.S.-Saudi relationship] up.”
On Tuesday in Riyadh, Rubio met separately with MBS to discuss not just the future of Ukraine but also that of Gaza. Rubio later praised the Saudi leader for his role in hosting the high-level U.S.-Russia talks.
Trump wants to skip the boring stuff
If all this sounds familiar, that’s because Trump used this playbook in his first term, with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. After months of nuclear threats and taunts against North Korea (remember “little rocket man” and “I too have a nuclear button”?), Trump went to Singapore for the first-ever summit meeting between a U.S. president and a North Korean leader.
A useful deal was always a possibility. Persuading North Korea to give up its nukes was never going to happen, but verifying or limiting North Korea’s arsenal, for example, could help stabilize the relationship and reduce the risk of accidents or miscalculations. But as Patricia Kim explained here at Good Authority in the months before that 2018 Singapore summit, such a deal would require “meticulous planning of what can and cannot be put on the negotiating table, along with close coordination with allies.”
There was no meticulous or close coordination of anything in Singapore, except perhaps the placement of the flags for the photo-op – which was the only tangible outcome of the summit, and a (free) gift to North Korea, which had long craved legitimacy on the world stage.
Ahead of Singapore, Trump skipped all the steps that normally make a summit the end of a long process. A “summit” is, after all, the pinnacle you reach after a long, sometimes difficult climb strewn with obstacles – a route best navigated with experienced guides and friends you trust.
Peace deals involve hard work – and collaboration
Research bears out the importance of doing the boring, invisible work of diplomacy that makes reaching summits possible. In my research with James Lebovic, we show that most high-level diplomatic travel undertaken by the American presidents and secretaries of state involves visits to allied or partner countries, and those are the countries the U.S. visits in crises.
For the Singapore summit, and now with the talks in Riyadh, there was no coordination with allies. Not only was Ukraine left out of the talks in Riyadh, but the Rubio trip came on the heels of Vice President JD Vance’s trip to the Munich Security Conference – yes, Munich – where he scolded Europe for not including far-right perspectives in its debates. Vance also opted to meet with the leader of Germany’s far-right AfD party, rather than German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
Peace deals are also built on the regular contacts and coordination between lower-level diplomatic, military, and intelligence officials and their allied counterparts – and even with adversaries. Such contacts have been happening between the United States and Russia since February 2022, so there have been communication channels.
But building on such contacts would require using the expertise and experience of the men and women who make up the U.S. intelligence, military, and diplomatic communities. Instead, the Trump administration has empowered Elon Musk’s DOGE team to lay waste to these communities. Already, the CIA sent a list with the first names and last initials of recent hires – the easiest to fire since they are still in their “probationary” period – over an unclassified email system to the White House, setting up a massive intelligence risk. The Pentagon expects to be in DOGE’s sights soon.
Rubio is a diplomatic cardboard cutout
And then there’s the State Department, already a prime target in Trump’s first term, when the size of the civil service and U.S. foreign service workforce shrank. Trump not only sidelined the department’s knowledge base, but actively disdained it.
When Trump nominated Rubio to be secretary of state, some commentators called him a “responsible choice” and thought he would be a stabilizing presence, given his relatively mainstream Republican hawkish views on foreign policy. Senators dutifully inquired about those views in his confirmation hearing, and quickly confirmed him, by a vote of 99-0.
But his first official moves in the new Trump administration reminded the world that Rubio, who had an acrimonious relationship with Trump during their 2016 GOP primary battle, is willing to change positions to suit his new boss.
For example, rather than show up to do the kind of regular face-to-face diplomacy that is both his job and, presumably, his inclination, he tweeted that he would skip the upcoming G20 foreign ministers meeting in South Africa. The message – decidedly not crafted in the kind of diplomatic language that results from clearing statements through regular State Department channels that let U.S. diplomats know what current U.S. policy is – stated that “South Africa is doing very bad things.” These “things” included “expropriating private property,” presumably a reference to false complaints by Elon Musk and Trump that whites in South Africa, where Musk was born, are losing their land. As Emmanuel Balogun explained earlier this week here at Good Authority, snubbing the G20 only hurts the United States.
Trump, in turn, has given Rubio acting control of the agencies he and Musk apparently want to “delete” or remake with loyalists, starting with USAID, an agency Rubio once defended vigorously. Rubio is also acting head of the National Archives.
Back at the State Department, reporting by Politico’s Nahal Toosi suggests that Rubio is “Secretary of State in name only,” having already disappointed those who hoped he might protect those who work in his building. Instead, he has been complicit in the dismantling of USAID, even calling some officials there “insubordinate,” and has embraced Trump positions that are 180 degrees out of phase with those for which he previously advocated with zeal. Toosi notes that Rubio has been sidelined by Musk and DOGE, and “Rubio appears hesitant to use the power he has – including his staff – to exert even logistical control.”
But Rubio’s appointment may have been doomed from the start.
Research suggests that diplomats can be effective in one of two ways. One way is to have the president’s ear. The conventional wisdom is that giving key ambassadorships to novice diplomats like presidential friends or donors is bad for diplomacy. But research by Michael Goldfien finds that such appointments are not “just patronage.” Instead, such appointments install someone who can credibly and effectively convey the president’s message to other countries.
The other way is to delegate diplomacy to those who are connected and even sympathetic to particular countries. As David Lindsey argues in his book Delegated Diplomacy, such sympathies can help build trust and make diplomatic messages more credible, ultimately leading to better cooperation.
Rubio is neither of these ideal types. No matter how much he changes his positions or praises Trump, he doesn’t and likely will never have Trump’s ear. And he’s not a seasoned diplomat with credible expertise or contacts with the countries highest on the diplomatic priority list. That leaves him in a kind of diplomatic no-man’s-land, unable to credibly speak for Trump or to build the kind of trust that could make him a useful carrier of diplomatic messages.
Ironically, that might mean Rubio will stay in his job longer than many have predicted. Trump presumably wants policy run through his special envoys (like Witkoff) and his national security advisor (Waltz), and needs someone to serve as acting head of dying agencies.
The talks in Riyadh show U.S. diplomacy is part of the omnicrisis
This is a long post, but it is worth explaining why none of this is likely to lead to a fair, lasting peace for Ukraine.
And that brings us to the Occam’s razor explanation: Trump is not interested in a fair, lasting peace for Ukraine. The wreckage of the Trump team’s appearances in Europe and Rubio’s trip to Riyadh, show that whatever Trump is after, it’s not keeping Ukraine sovereign and in the European orbit, or making Russia pay any price for its illegal invasions.
As I wrote here at Good Authority before the election, Trump’s foreign policy, for all his claims of unpredictability, is quite predictable in its fundamentals. Trump disdains trade pacts and alliances, and he admires dictators. The speed and force of the Musk-DOGE assault on the U.S. government may have been a genuine surprise even to Rubio. But it is only likely to accelerate the outcome Trump already wanted: a peace deal favorable to Russia and disastrous for Ukraine and its European supporters, along with – or maybe as a way to bring about – the demise of the State Department as an instrument of U.S. power.
