If the GOP has a future, it looks a lot like Marco Rubio - comment

He appeared less like a local politician who fights for sound bites on TV panels and more like a serious statesman or policy-maker. This is what he has quietly become: the indispensable man in a very messy world.

For a Republican Party that has spent the last decade flirting with isolationism and algorithm-driven outrage, Rubio’s November is a reminder that there is still another tradition on the American Right. Call it conservative statecraft: hawkish but not nihilist, pro-Israel without being captive to its most radical factions, suspicious of international institutions yet willing to build coalitions when they serve American and allied security.

The arc of this November tells the story.

Some European governments were already bristling at Trump-era tariffs and at US strikes on narco-terrorist boats. Others were signaling readiness to recognize a Palestinian state, regardless of what Washington or Jerusalem thought.

Rubio’s pitch was something more uncomfortable and, in a way, more honest: an argument that if the US and its partners want Hamas disarmed, Israel secure, and Gaza governed by anyone other than jihadists or chaos, then someone has to do the boring, dangerous work of stabilization.

A week later, the UN Security Council unanimously endorsed the same 20-point Gaza plan and its temporary stabilization force, marking a rare moment when Washington, Arab capitals, and European diplomats aligned, albeit with some discomfort.

If you are on the American Right and you believe, as do many of Rubio’s voters, that Israel’s survival is a vital US interest, and that October 7, 2023, must never be repeated, then Rubio is what responsible power looks like.

It is not a hashtag. It is not a podcast monologue about globalism. It is a Florida conservative in a dark suit counting votes in a drafty UN chamber so that an ally has the time and space to finish dismantling a terrorist army.

The easy story to tell about today’s GOP is that the isolationists have already won. There is, undeniably, a noisy faction that wants America to walk away from Ukraine, reduce its European alliance network to a tariff negotiation, and treat every international institution as inherently illegitimate. Its foreign policy is mostly a gesture, a kind of aesthetic anti-globalism.

Rubio is not of that faction. He is also no longer the eager interventionist of 2015, promising safe zones in Syria and regime change in Caracas.

What has emerged instead in 2025 is a figure who accepts that the US cannot fix everything but insists that there are a few fronts where abdication is simply not an option. Israel is at the center of that map.

That is not new. As a senator, Rubio spent a decade building the statutory scaffolding of the US-Israel alliance: backing the Taylor Force Act, which cut off certain aid to the Palestinian Authority over “martyr payments”; pushing the US-Israel Security Assistance Authorization Act to lock in Israel’s qualitative military edge; and making the Combating BDS Act his signature legislation.

Within the Jewish world, he was seen, quietly but consistently, as one of Israel’s staunchest allies in either party.

What is new is the way that senatorial record has been translated into power.

Rubio’s critics on the Left say his State Department is the most aggressively pro-Israel one in US history, and they do not mean it as a compliment. There is real substance behind the charge.

This year, the administration took the extraordinary step of sanctioning a United Nations special rapporteur over her work on alleged Israeli abuses in the Palestinian territories, essentially treating a UN human-rights investigator more like a designated terrorism financier than a civil servant.

Funding for UNRWA was cut off entirely after months of revelations about staff ties to Hamas, and Washington formally launched a review of its role in other UN bodies, which may yet end in withdrawal.

The message is blunt: International organizations that institutionalize anti-Israel or antisemitic bias will no longer enjoy the assumption of American support.

The same logic has been brought home. When masked protesters stormed Columbia University’s Butler Library this spring, chanting slogans that glorified Hamas, Rubio said the State Department would be reviewing the visa status of foreign students involved in the library building’s occupation. He stressed that a visa to the US is a privilege – not a right for those who endorse designated terrorist organizations.

You can agree or disagree with this program. What you cannot say is that it is incoherent. The through line is simple enough: Institutions that normalize or protect anti-Jewish violence, whether they sit in Geneva or in an Ivy League administration building, are now fair game for American power.

For a Republican Party that too often drifts into performance politics, this is a strikingly concrete project. It is also one that a post-Trump Right could plausibly own.

The most interesting test of Rubio’s leadership has not been in Gaza at all. It has been in Judea and Samaria, where his instincts as a longtime supporter of the settlement movement have collided with his responsibilities as custodian of a fragile regional architecture.

In late October, a bloc of Israeli lawmakers advanced a bill to apply sovereignty to large parts of the West Bank, an annexation move that would have delighted parts of the American Right and detonated what remains of the Gaza ceasefire and the Saudi normalization track.

Rubio did not suddenly rediscover the language of the Obama years. He did not call settlements “illegal” or threaten to pull aid. Instead, he used two carefully chosen ideas: “counterproductive” and “not now.”

He publicly warned that annexation threatened the painstakingly assembled peace framework and made clear that the president would not support the move at this time, signaling that Washington would not provide diplomatic cover if the Knesset charged ahead.

Then he flew to Israel, where he walked on Pilgrim’s Road and toured the City of David archaeological site in east Jerusalem, a place that has become a symbol of Jewish historical claims to the land. In public comments, he reiterated a line that has become almost a mantra: There can be no Palestinian state unless Israel agrees to it.

It was an almost Kissingerian performance. In Washington, he quietly froze one of the Israeli Right’s most cherished projects. In Jerusalem, he reminded anxious settlers that the man doing the freezing shares their basic view of history.

This is what leadership inside an alliance looks like. It is not flattery. It is not the fantasy, popular in some online right-wing spaces, that America should simply sign over its Middle East policy to whichever Israeli party is most aggressive at any given moment. It is the harder work of saying no, and meaning it, for the sake of a larger strategic goal.

It has become fashionable in some conservative circles to argue that the “real” base no longer cares about any of this. Why worry about Gaza, or Kiryat Gat, or UN agencies, when there are school-board meetings to livestream and viral clips to share?

But the Republican Party is not a comment section. It is a party that, at least in theory, wants to govern a superpower. That superpower has allies who rely on it, enemies who probe its weaknesses, and adversaries in Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran who are still looking for ways to test how far American security guarantees actually extend.

In that world, there are really only two kinds of Republican foreign policy on offer.

One is the politics of resentment, which treats every international engagement as a betrayal of “real America,” every ally as a grifter, and every hard problem as someone else’s business. It is emotionally satisfying and strategically useless.

The other is embodied, imperfectly but recognizably, in Rubio’s November: a willingness to use American power to protect friends, to punish institutions that enable antisemitism, to build structures that actually keep rockets from flying, and to tell harsh truths to allies when necessary.

Rubio is not a flawless avatar for that second tradition. He made mistakes as a younger senator. He has occasionally overreached, especially in Latin America. The sweeping “stop-work” freeze on foreign aid earlier this year did real damage to global health programs before exemptions were carved out.

Yet when you zoom out from the daily noise, the contrast is clear: In a single month, he helped steer a Gaza plan through the UN, reassured Israelis that there is no alternative framework for their security, and made it meaningfully riskier for antisemitic agitators on American campuses and in international forums to treat Jewish safety as collateral damage.

That is not globalism. It is not a retreat. It is something more difficult and more necessary: the practice of statecraft in an ugly century.

Republicans who still care about America’s role in the world should pay attention. If the party’s future belongs to the loudest isolationist with a ring light, then Israel’s security, Ukraine’s survival, and Taiwan’s deterrence will all eventually be someone else’s problem.

If the next generation of conservative leaders instead looks a little more like the Rubio we saw in November 2025, then the GOP might still be capable of something more than performance. It might still be capable of governing a superpower that stands, unapologetically, with the Jewish state and with the fragile liberal order it anchors.

For those who believe that alliance, however strained, is worth preserving, that is not just a partisan preference. It is a bet on a particular kind of Republican future, one in which Marco Rubio’s brand of disciplined, pro-Israel, anti-antisemitism conservatism defeats both the alt-right’s nihilism and the isolationists’ shrug.