I almost fell off my chair listening to Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s recent interview with former Fox News host Megyn Kelly where he declared unipolarity an anomaly and treated a return to multipolarity essentially as a correction by the gravitational forces of geopolitics.
This is what he said:
“So it’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power. That was not — that was an anomaly. It was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet. We face that now with China and to some extent Russia, and then you have rogue states like Iran and North Korea you have to deal with.”
Rubio’s comments should be getting more attention.
Setting aside whether he truly believes this or is simply adjusting to President Trump's worldview, it is still very significant for the secretary of state to not only declare unipolarity over (Hillary Clinton said the world was multipolar already in 2010, but saying it and meaning it are two different things), but to also treat the return to multipolarity as a return to normalcy.
It’s not clear how far Rubio has thought this through, and he makes no mention of ending primacy as a grand strategy. However, he speaks of centering U.S. interests in U.S. foreign policy and that the U.S. cannot be responsible for resolving every problem in the world.
But if one sees unipolarity as a historical accident and an anomaly, then it would be difficult to justify a grand strategy of primacy or liberal hegemony that, at its essence, seeks to either restore or prolong that anomaly.
Of course, the gap between what is thought, what is said, and what is done by the Trump administration may be quite sizable.
Either way, Rubio's interview here deserves more attention. Not only because it is refreshing but also because a serious grandstrategic conversation — free from dishonest accusations of isolationism or China-hugging — is long overdue.
Trita Parsi is the co-founder and Executive Vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
Top image credit: Secretary Marco Rubio participates in a podcast with Megyn Kelly at the Department of State in Washington, D.C., January 30, 2025. (Official State Department photo by Freddie Everett)
Top Image Credit: US presidential candidate US Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) (L) makes his point as US Senator John McCain (R-AZ ) adjusts his shirt collar as they take part in the CNN/Los Angeles Times Republican presidential debate at Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California January 30, 2008. Air Force One used by Reagan is in background. REUTERS/Robert Galbraith (UNITED STATES) US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION 2008 (USA)
Ron Paul is turning 90 on August 20. At 72, he was a revolutionary.
Today, there is a raucous foreign policy debate within the Republican Party. Populist, realist and libertarian “America First” Republicans argue against endless wars and for fiscal responsibility, while holdover hawks continue to insist on a robust U.S. hand and military presence anywhere they can get it, no matter the cost.
In 2008, there was no debate. While broad public opinion had soured on the Iraq War and President George W. Bush’s approval reached historic lows, the GOP of that era had spent nearly a decade marinating in blind support for militarism, the PATRIOT Act, and torture in the name of “counterterrorism."
War was who Republicans were. It wasn’t a question. It was GOP identity. Sen. John McCain became the 2008 GOP presidential nominee based on that identity, and lost.
Throughout the 2008 Republican presidential primaries, Congressman Ron Paul tried to warn his party that America’s interventionist foreign policy had not only been a disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan, but was bad for America in general — and Republicans in particular.
They couldn’t hear it. Like clockwork, each time Paul criticized U.S. foreign policy during the debates, Republicans accused him of siding with the enemy. After explaining how perpetual American intervention created tension abroad that led to 9/11, Fox News moderator Chris Wallace said to Paul, "You're saying we should take our marching orders from al Qaeda?"
Paul replied, citing the need for a congressional declaration of war, "No, I'm saying we should take our marching orders from the Constitution!"
The other candidates all laughed at Paul. Telling Republicans to tone down the warmongering in 2008 was like telling Sydney Sweeney to lighten up on sex appeal in 2025.
Paul did not win the nomination, but became arguably the most influential GOP candidate in that election precisely because he was the only Republican arguing for a more restrained foreign policy. He became one of the most popular candidates, in terms of raw grassroots support, based on his staunch antiwar message, drawing thousands of supporters to his rallies, disproportionately young.
Paul’s popularity exploded due to one particular debate. As Jim Antle observed at The American Conservative weeks before Paul retired from Congress in early 2013, “On May 15, 2007, the Republican contenders debated in Columbia, South Carolina. Paul argued that American intervention in the Middle East — bombings, sanctions, and efforts to destabilize foreign governments — helped turn local populations and their co-religionists against us, to the point that they would contemplate terrorist attacks like those on 9/11.”
“Are you suggesting we invited the 9/11 attacks, sir?” asked the Fox News moderator.
“Paul had said nothing of the sort,” Antle continued, “but neither did he react to the implication behind the question as forcefully as he might have. Giuliani pounced. ‘That’s an extraordinary statement, as somebody who lived through the attack of Sept. 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever heard that before, and I’ve heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11.’”
The audience erupted. After the applause died down Giuliani demanded that Paul take back what he said, “I would ask the congressman to withdraw that comment and tell us he didn’t really mean that.”
That’s when Ron Paul doubled down. He detailed the CIA term “blowback” as an explanation for 9/11, an argument that Bush-Cheney, neocon propaganda-soaked audience definitely did not want to hear and resented Paul for making it.
But after years of foreign policy failure in the Middle East, certain kinds of Republicans were open to Paul’s message. Many independents were drawn to his campaign. Paul also attracted a significant number of progressives (Paul later said he would put his longtime friend, progressive Democrat Congressman Dennish Kucinich in his cabinet). For the Paul faithful, it was all about the ideas.
At the time of Paul and Giuliani’s heated exchange, Rudy was considered the frontrunner and Ron was the gadfly. By the time the 2008 election was over, Paul would receive one million primary votes, more than Giuliani who dropped out. In 2012, Paul doubled that number to two million. The nominees in both cycles, McCain and later, Mitt Romney, both ran and lost on Bush-style neoconservative foreign policy agendas.
The next Republican actually elected president ran on ‘America First’ foreign policy platform that promised to end “endless wars” and even went so far as to claim George W. Bush “lied” America into the Iraq War. He sounded like Ron Paul.
Has Donald Trump always lived up to his antiwar rhetoric? Not even close.
Did he change the foreign policy conversation in the Republican Party? Undeniably.
Today, your typical, red-meat, rightwing Republican might talk about foreign policy in ways that seem closer to Paul than McCain or Romney. Conservatives can denounce foreign intervention and aid and those conversations now fit comfortably on the right. Whereas Paul’s Republican detractors used to love to smear him as siding with terrorists, hawks, neocons, and Democrats who reflexively accuse Trump of being “Putin’s puppet” are immediately suspect to MAGA members. That trick just doesn’t work anymore with most of the Republican base.
Trump ran for president within a post Bush-Cheney GOP that didn’t know what it stood for anymore other than being against Barack Obama. It quickly came to stand for Trump, whatever that might have meant in any given moment, but that upheaval did usher in a radical rethinking of Republican foreign policy.
Paul ran for president when war was the Republican religion, undeniable and unassailable, in which heretics were to be excommunicated. Later, it was so many neocons who would actually jump ship.
What Republican foreign policy is in 2025 is a very different conversation than it was in 2008. Donald Trump might have upended that consensus, but 17 years ago Ron Paul became the first candidate to so fearlessly question it, leading to more challenges and changing even more minds ever since.
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Top photo credit: Launch of Duncan on the Clyde in Scotland MOD, Royal Navy, 2010. (Ian Arthur/MOD/Wikimedia)
Having spent the past decade telling the British public that Russia poses the biggest ‘immediate threat’ to the United Kingdom, the idea that Britain should get ready to fight China is idiotic and irresponsible.
During a visit to Australia to join HMS Prince of Wales, which is currently leading Carrier Strike Group 25 to Asia,UK Defense Secretary John Healey implied that the UK might be willing to fight China in the Pacific over Taiwan. “If we have to fight, as we have done in the past, Australia and the UK are nations that will fight together. We exercise together and by exercising together and being more ready to fight, we deter better together.”
Rather than staying silent on military engagement over Taiwan, as UK governments have tended to do, Healey is trying to position Britain’s military forces as a deterrent to a resurgent China. This is deluded, and not just because the UK has shown itself unwilling to fight Russia directly over Ukraine.
Russia, as it were, is considered much more of a “threat” to European security than China. But even with Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s pledge of increasing defense spending to 5% of GDP by 2035 – and it is questionable whether this is affordable given the UK’s fiscal constraints – Britain most certainly isn’t big enough to fight both China and Russia, even if it wanted to.
Indeed, one of the arguments in favor of the U.S. pressuring Europe to foot the bill for ongoing war with Russia in Ukraine, is to allow America to refocus its energies in the Indo-Pacific region. An often and, in my view, distasteful mantra advanced by even the most hawkish US politicians on Russia, is that Ukrainian troops are fighting so U.S. troops don’t have to.
Healey’s comments display a worrying lack of strategic focus. The recent UK Strategic Defence Review (SDR) committed British naval forces heavily to the creation of an Atlantic Bastion designed to secure the North Atlantic from the growing threat of Russia’s rapidly expanding sub-surface fleet. Since 2011 alone, the Russian navy has taken delivery of 27 new submarines with more under construction.
At best, the SDR sets a target for the building of up to 12 new attack submarines to replace the five Astute class submarines currently in service, two of which are in refit. Any new vessels wouldn’t arrive at the earliest until the late 2030s. It also envisions a complex system of ocean sensors and uncrewed sub-surface assets to counter Russian submarines. Simply securing the Atlantic from a rapidly rising Russian threat will require extensive cooperation with European navies, in particular with France, Germany and Norway.
Even with a replenished fleet, UK naval power still won’t be sufficient to have global impact. The Carrier Strike Group 25, currently in the Pacific, has deployed a significant chunk of available naval assets: one carrier, one destroyer, one frigate, and one attack submarine; that’s right, all of four vessels.
As I have said before, the Chinese won’t be worried by this. China currently boasts at least 234 vessels, which is larger than the U.S. fleet, having outstripped American warship production by a significant margin since 2010. While the Chinese fleet is thought to be deficient in some key capabilities, such as aircraft carriers, larger fleets have won “25 out of 28 historical wars.”
Admittedly, one of three victories in which an outnumbered fleet prevailed was the Battle of Trafalgar where the Royal Navy pitted itself against France and Spain off the coast of Cadiz. Admiral Horatio Nelson had at his disposal 27 ships of the line and 4 frigates. This compares with the modern Royal Navy which, not including submarines, which didn’t exist in 1805, has 24 blue-water fighting vessels, including aircraft carriers, destroyers, frigates and mine counter-measures vessels.
The idea that, even in its entirety, this can deter China is a fantasy. Of course, any British and Australian military engagement in Taiwan would be under the command of a U.S. admiral as part of a fleet possibly supplemented by those Asian countries that might be willing to join the fight, possibly including Japan and South Korea.
A doomsday scenario of a World War III in the Pacific would draw much of the Royal Navy away from British shores, leaving our country even more exposed to Russia. So, while Healey’s hawkish comments might play well with breathless Western journalists at a presser on the deck of a British aircraft carrier docked in Darwin, they make no sense in the real world.
And, in any case, they make the defense secretary appear tone deaf and out of touch given the diplomatic pivot towards China that has taken place under Starmer’s government.
To his credit, the prime minister has sought to position Sino-British relations somewhere between the naivete of former Prime Minister David Cameron’s unpopular “golden era” and the aggressively Sinophobic policies adopted by Prime Minister Theresa May and her successors. That has led to unprecedented political engagement by UK ministers since the end of 2024, including visits by the foreign secretary and chancellor of the exchequer, chief of the defense staff and, most recently, the national security adviser.
In the face of intense media scrutiny of any moves that signal a softening of the UK’s stance towards China, the Labour government is trying to pull off the impossible. Attract much- needed Chinese investment into Britain while keeping Chinese hands off of sensitive industries and critical national infrastructure. Disagree in private about issues around democracy in Hong Kong and Uighur rights in Xinjiang, while reopening dormant areas of economic and financial cooperation.
Of course, the biggest challenge Starmer faces on China is in trying to boost economic and trade relations at the same time he attempts to do the same with the U.S. and the European Union, without making any trade-offs along the way.
And therein lies the true vacuity of Healey’s comments. They may play well with AUKUS allies but will be understood as provocative in Beijing. This episode offers a healthy reminder that Britain will struggle to be friends with everyone, while looking to pick fights around the globe.
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Top photo credit: Palestinian children suffering from malnutrition receive medical care at Al-Rantisi Children's Hospital, July 24, 2025, Gaza. Photo by Omar Ashtawy apaimages Gaza city Gaza Strip Palestinian Territory 240725_Gaza_OSH_0014 Copyright: xapaimagesxOmarxAshtawyxxapaimagesx
The prospects for negotiating a ceasefire and an end to the humanitarian disaster in the Gaza Strip appear as dim as ever. Israeli and U.S. representatives walked out of talks with Hamas in Qatar that had been mediated by the Qataris and Egyptians. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is talking about “alternative” means of achieving Israel’s goals in the territory.
President Donald Trump, echoing Netanyahu’s levying of blame on Hamas, asserted that “Hamas didn’t really want to make a deal. I think they want to die.” Trump went on to mention a need to “finish the job,” evidently referring to Israel’s continued devastating assault on the Strip and its residents.
I have been thinking for a long time about the negotiation of ceasefires. Nearly 50 years ago, I wrote a book, “Negotiating Peace: War Termination as a Bargaining Process,” which explored the diplomatic and military dynamics of how two belligerents negotiate a peace while simultaneously fighting a war.
What is taking place in Gaza now is mostly not a war, even though that term commonly is applied to the violence there. It is instead a largely unilateral assault on a population and its means of living. It is a situation in which one side, Israel, has — as Trump might put it — nearly all the cards.
The news stories emerging almost daily from Gaza are not about pitched battles between the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and Hamas fighters. They are mostly not about battles at all. Instead, they are about the latest large-scale killing by Israel of Gazans, mostly civilians, at a rate that has averaged about 150 deaths per day since the current round of carnage began in late 2023. Civilians are killed largely with airstrikes but also more recently through getting shot while seeking ever-scarcer food.
Mass starvation has become perhaps the most gut-wrenching part of the Gaza catastrophe, and one where Israel has again tried to shift blame onto Hamas. A longtime Israeli accusation in endeavoring to shut down the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA)—the principal international organization with the mission of aiding Palestinian refugees, including in Gaza—is that Hamas supposedly was stealing UNRWA-supplied food. Trump has echoed that accusation.
A study by the U.S. Agency for International Development (before the Trump administration dismantled the agency) of reported incidents of loss or theft of U.S.-supplied humanitarian assistance in Gaza found no evidence that Hamas has engaged in widespread diversion of aid. More recent press reporting shows that the IDF itself has found no evidence of Hamas seizing or diverting aid.
Israel’s opposition to UNRWA has nothing to do with Hamas or with theft of humanitarian aid. It instead concerns how UNRWA — because it is a United Nations agency explicitly focused on Palestinians — constitutes an international recognition that the Palestinians are a nation and that many of them are refugees from their homeland.
The humanitarian situation in Gaza got worse once Israel succeeded in pushing UNRWA aside. The U.S.-backed and Israeli-controlled alternative aid scheme is not only woefully inadequate in meeting immediate needs but also designed as an adjunct to Israel’s ethnic cleansing objectives. The limitation of aid to a few distribution points facilitates the forced relocation of surviving Gazans into what amounts to a concentration camp, as a possible prelude to removal from the Gaza Strip altogether.
Some aid has recently been dropped into Gaza by air. Airdrops are an ineffective and inefficient way of trying to relieve the starvation. The amounts delivered are a tiny fraction of what is needed. The cost of delivery is far higher than by land. As demonstrated by an earlier U.S. effort to deliver aid this way, some of the supplies are lost because they fall into the sea or, even worse, kill people crushed by falling pallets. But for some donors, an airdrop serves as a visually dramatic conscience-calming gesture.
For Israel, it serves as a distraction from the fact that the biggest impediment to getting humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip is Israel’s continued land blockade of the territory. Valuing that distraction, Israel itself has joined in the airdrop gesture. At the same time, however, Israel continues to allow only a trickle of aid to cross the land border, with many hundreds of truckloads left to spoil and be destroyed by the IDF.
In my decades-old book, I identified a type of war ending that is an alternative to a negotiated settlement as “extermination/expulsion,” meaning that the militarily dominant side physically obliterates its opponent or pushes it out of contested territory. Extermination/expulsion of the opponent is an appropriate label for Israel’s objective in Gaza.
The prevailing Israeli conception of the opponent, or enemy, in Gaza is the entire Palestinian population, an attitude that was already well rooted on the Israeli Right before the Hamas attack in October 2023 and has grown even stronger and wider since then. The deaths already inflicted, directly or indirectly, by the IDF have significantly advanced the extermination objective. The expulsion part has mostly been the stuff of internal Israeli deliberations, although it came more into the open when Trump gave Netanyahu’s government the gift of endorsing the ethnic cleansing with his Riviera-in-Gaza proposal.
Insofar as Hamas is defined as the enemy, the Israeli objective of extermination has been more explicit. The Trump administration has declared its support for Israel’s repeatedly stated objective of “eradicating” Hamas. Netanyahu, speaking to an internal IDF audience last year, said that “we will kill the Hamas leadership” and that this killing as well as acting “in all areas in the Gaza Strip” was part of “total victory” that would be needed before military operations would end.
The objective of extermination/expulsion is an obvious deal-killer. It makes no sense to expect the other party to a conflict to negotiate its own eradication.
Netanyahu also has other personal and political reasons to keep Israeli military operations going indefinitely. These include delaying his full reckoning with corruption charges and keeping intact his coalition with right-wing extremists who are especially vehement about eliminating or expelling Palestinians from Gaza and who strongly oppose a ceasefire.
For Netanyahu’s government, any talk of a ceasefire has little to do with getting closer to peace in Gaza. Instead, it is only a temporary pause in operations that this government finds expedient for whatever reason, be it logistical resupply, relief from diplomatic pressure, or something else. As with the ceasefire earlier this year, the Israelis will feel free to break it whenever they no longer find it expedient.
Hamas has wanted a ceasefire for some time, and why shouldn’t it? Much of its leadership has indeed been killed, and its ability to resist further Israeli attacks is badly battered though not eliminated. The longer the suffering of the Gazan population continues, the more that Hamas may lose support among those who blame it for triggering the devastation with its 2023 attack. The group has nothing to gain, and only more to lose, as the violence continues.
Throughout off-and-on ceasefire talks since last year, the main sticking point has been that Hamas wants a clear route to a permanent end to hostilities while Israel wants to retain the ability to resume its attacks. Hamas also has tried to use what few cards it has to gain relief for the civilian population of Gaza, by calling for unimpeded humanitarian aid and a withdrawal of Israeli forces from densely populated areas so that residents can return to their homes. In addition, it has sought freedom for some of the Palestinians in Israeli prisons.
Press reporting based on internal documents from the recent round of talks in Qatar shows that the Hamas negotiators worked closely and carefully with the Qatari and Egyptian mediators to try to craft a viable ceasefire agreement. Hamas had already agreed to the great majority of the content in a framework document that the mediators said Israel had accepted.
The amendments Hamas sought were mostly focused on relief for Palestinian civilians and aimed at getting greater precision and clarity in the framework agreement. For example, regarding withdrawals of Israeli troops, instead of the draft’s vague language about withdrawal to lines “close” to what was in the January 2025 ceasefire agreement, Hamas insisted that the negotiators talk in detail about specific lines on maps. The Hamas negotiators offered their own proposals that made some refinements of only 100 or 200 meters from the maps they finally were given.
Regarding release of Palestinian prisoners, in response to the vague framework language, the Hamas representatives wanted to negotiate specific numbers, to match the specific numbers of Israeli hostages to be released in the framework. On humanitarian aid, Hamas wanted a return to United Nations administration of aid distribution and a reopening of the Rafah crossing with Egypt.
Having negotiated seriously on these and other points, the Hamas representatives were taken aback by the subsequent U.S. and Israeli walkout and by Trump’s accusations about Hamas’s alleged responsibility for the breakdown.
Trump’s assertion that Hamas “didn’t really want to make a deal” and instead wanted “to die” is nonsense. The talks in Qatar ended because Netanyahu’s government decided it did not want to make a deal at this time. As with most things involving Israel, the Trump administration fell in line behind Netanyahu.
Blaming Hamas for continuation of the Gaza catastrophe is another instance of treating a Palestinian resistance group—whether it is Hamas or any other, and there have been many of them—as the cause of violence associated with the subjugation of Palestinians and occupation of their homelands, rather than as an effect of the subjugation and occupation.
Netanyahu in the past has found it expedient to treat Hamas as something other than the evil incarnate that Israel portrays it as today. Netanyahu earlier facilitated Qatari payments to Hamas as a way of building up the group as a counterweight to the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority.
This tactic was part of a continuing Israeli strategy to keep Palestinians divided, so that Israel can say that it “does not have a negotiating partner”—a line echoed by Israel’s powerful lobby in the United States. That approach is yet another indication of unwillingness to reach a negotiated peace with the Palestinians.
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