Secretary of State Marco Rubio decried the “rules-based order” enforced by international lawyers and “activist courts” in a Friday evening broadside, his first address since the midterm elections and one that comes as efforts to draft him for a presidential bid heat up.
“We Americans, we are not passive and inward-looking people. To submit to the sterile vision of radical judges or soulless global bureaucrats would be to betray who we are, to betray ourselves,” he said in the speech to the conservative legal group the Federalist Society.
Rubio spoke as the Republican Party turns its attention to who could win in 2028 following a wipeout in the midterm elections. Some Republicans have said he is best placed to chart a new course away from President Donald Trump — although Democrats say they plan to grill Rubio on Trump’s foreign policy once they take the majorities in Congress.
Rubio didn’t break from Trump in his speech, instead mounting a ferocious defense of the administration’s policies in sweeping language and an easy, friendly delivery to a receptive audience that interrupted him with applause. He backed up the sinking of alleged drug-smuggling boats, the capture of Venezuela’s former President Nicolás Maduro and the administration’s aggressive campaign against immigrants.
He also defended the war in Iran, saying that Tehran’s military buildup “had to be addressed” and that the Iranian regime was behind “every major problem in the Middle East.” He defined victory in Iran as “they can never have a nuclear weapon.”
Rubio’s remarks offered an opportunity to court an influential wing of the conservative movement. The Federalist Society has played a significant role in shaping the Republican legal establishment, as its network of lawyers and judges helped drive a transformation of the federal judiciary during Trump’s first term.
“We’ve heard the concept ‘international law’ invoked against nearly every major foreign policy decision or action of this administration,” Rubio said. “None of this has anything to do with any real higher standard of justice. It is a function of the people who control the official organs of global governance,” he continued, naming a global elite that uses international law as an “instrument to advance their interest under the pretense of universal principles.”
That is why, he said, the Trump administration has sanctioned the International Criminal Court, which he said is “an unelected world tribunal which claims to supersede the laws and constitutions of sovereign states.”
To underscore his point, Rubio referenced the Roman general Pompey “when he said to those who were trying to invoke their city’s charters against his legions, he said, ‘Stop quoting laws to men with swords.’”
Rubio also laid into the “activist courts” who have blocked the Trump administration’s immigration policies and would “transform our towns into refugee camps for the entire planet.”
Still, he stopped short of embracing the anti-immigration agenda of some of MAGA’s fiercest acolytes, saying, “America will always be a nation that welcomes people from other places, so long as we have certain rules and controls and restrictions in place that determine how many people can come, when they can come, who can come.”
The speech capped Rubio’s two-year tenure in Trump’s Cabinet as secretary of State, a position he has held while serving as national security adviser (as well as chief archivist). Over that time, he has tacked toward a MAGA worldview.
Rubio had previously praised programs advancing human rights and democracy abroad. Under Trump, he has cut programs that execute that work. He also defended the decision to replace flags of the world at Foggy Bottom with American flags.
“We’re not the United Nations,” he said Friday, “it’s the State Department of the United States.”
