100 Days of Ruin
Part V: Diplomacy Undone
Even as the markets convulsed,
even as the skies rained wreckage and defense crumbled into emoji-flecked scandal,
there remained one last thread tying America to the world:
diplomacy.
It was a thread thin and fraying, but real —
woven by treaties, alliances, quiet negotiations, human effort spanning decades.
Into this fragile breach stumbled Marco Rubio,
armed not with strategy, nor vision, but with a half-drunk water bottle, a clutch of slogans, and the vacant certainty of a man who mistook verbosity for wisdom.
It was once said that diplomacy is the art of telling someone to go to hell in such a way they look forward to the trip. Under Secretary of State Marco Rubio, it became the art of forgetting where hell was — and selling the ticket to Canada.
Rubio's first acts were theatrical and petty: renaming conference rooms, cutting foreign language services, and proposing the annexation of Canada — an idea first floated in jest, then repeated without irony, and finally echoed in a televised interview.
His reorganization of the State Department gutted USAID. Programs for famine relief, maternal health, and education were dissolved with bureaucratic finality. Only the regime-change initiatives for Cuba remained untouched — an obsession as persistent as mold and far less nutritious.
When asked about NATO, Rubio called it "an aging subscription service" and wondered aloud if the U.S. should "pivot to bilateral vibes." Aides clarified he meant one-on-one agreements. The rest of the world clarified that it had stopped taking his calls.
Ukraine was told to "tough it out." (Diplomacy was tough.) Africa was told to "grow locally." Europe was simply told nothing — and returned the favor.
And so diplomacy was not killed outright. It was unstaffed, unspoken, unfunded, and eventually, unseen.
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