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: U.S. President Donald Trump welcomes Argentina's President Javier Milei at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., October 14, 2025. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
It has been a busy week for U.S. policy towards Argentina.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced Wednesday that the U.S. would be doubling the assistance it is marshaling for Argentina from $20 billion to $40 billion. The increase comes ahead of legislative elections on October 26 that will elect half the lower house and one-third of the upper house, and represents an increasingly strenuous effort in Washington to bolster Argentine President Javier Milei financially and politically.
Ironically, one reason for an even bigger bailout package might have been a comment by the White House itself. Heading into a meeting with President Donald Trump on Tuesday, an optimistic Milei is reported to have said “we will have dollars pouring out of our ears.” During the meeting, Trump burst that bubble, remarking that “if he loses, we’re not going to be generous with Argentina,” a remark that immediately hit markets.
A day later, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent tried to remedy the situation, saying that beyond the original amount the U.S. had committed to lend Argentina, the Trump administration was coordinating the delivery of another $20 billion for the country from banks and sovereign wealth funds. Bessent invoked an “economic Monroe Doctrine” and said the outcome of upcoming elections in Chile and Colombia depended on the fate of Milei’s presidency. He thus grounded the need for assistance in the possibility that electorates in those countries might follow the cue from Argentine voters despite their very different circumstances (as detailed below).
Milei’s first term ends formally in 2027, but he is under severe pressure from domestic politicians and international investors. Argentina was a darling of the markets following Milei’s election in 2023 as he pushed through radical reductions in the size of government by decree, arguing that it was the only way to deliver the country from a long history of high inflation and serial defaults.
However, in early September, his party received a drubbing from voters tired of austerity in the province of Buenos Aires, home to roughly 40% of the population. This hit Argentine bonds and led to a sharp depreciation of the Argentine peso. Local and foreign investors fled, worried that the results in the provincial election were a harbinger of worse to come in the congressional polls.
By the end of September, the U.S. had stepped in, offering Milei’s government a level of support practically unprecedented in recent history (and yet apparently still not enough). The Treasury offered an arrangement where Argentina could borrow dollars against pesos, hinted that it might buy the country’s debt, and later even purchased the country’s currency in foreign exchange markets.
While Mexico did receive ample support from the U.S. in 1995, when that country suffered its own devaluation shock, the U.S. Treasury did not actually buy Mexican pesos on that occasion, unlike its actions during the current intervention in Argentine markets. And the U.S. rescue efforts for Mexico were for a country that was a member of the North American Free Trade Agreement, already the U.S.’s third-largest trading partner (it is now the biggest), and supported a new president about to enter a six-year term after an election.
In Argentina’s case, however, the U.S. is assisting an embattled leader facing an election. And Trump’s own remarks suggest that American support depends upon the electorate delivering the “right” result, from Washington’s point of view. The desired result would be able to deliver a legislature that is unable to override Milei’s vetoes of congressional measures, as has happened repeatedly in recent weeks.
Bessent subsequently walked back Trump’s threats a bit, but the essence remains that American support depends on the legislature allowing Milei free rein with his policies.
But that in turn makes the calculus behind administration support even more tricky. Explicit reminders that the U.S. will turn off the spigot if Argentina votes “wrong” could either scare the electorate into voting “the right way” or lead to further falls in Milei’s popularity. And from the point of view of investors or wealthier Argentines, regardless of how they feel about Milei, the uncertainty not just around political outcomes but also around the U.S. reaction could be a motive to exit the country’s assets.
Compounding matters, there is widespread agreement among economists that the Argentine peso needs to depreciate, so that even if Milei does get a favorable result in the legislative elections, he could decide to devalue the peso once past the hurdle of the ballot. Which, of course, could be a prudential reason to exit the peso before the election.
All this raises the question of whether Washington’s efforts will help restore confidence in Argentina’s finances and in Milei or serve as a subsidy for fleeing locals and foreigners (including some well-connected ones) by making dollars more easily available.
And that is not the sole controversy here. American farmers are livid that the U.S. is channeling assistance not just to a competitor, but to a country so desperate for dollars that it lifted a grain export tax briefly, allowing it to sell 20 cargoes of soybeans to China even as Chinese soy imports from the U.S. have plummeted.
Why is Washington doubling down on a strategy that carries such financial and political risks? U.S. officials have insisted that the Milei experiment could turn around an Argentina that has been hobbled by serial financial crises over several decades. But over the last three decades, Argentina has had two other presidents — Carlos Menem and Mauricio Macri — who tried measures not that different from those pushed by Milei and yet ended up failing the tests of both politics and economics.
Similarly, Bessent’s argument that bolstering Milei is essential to keep the left from winning upcoming elections in Chile and Colombia is also unconvincing. First of all, the sheer scale of Argentina’s financial problem dwarfs those of most other countries in South America, so it is unclear what lessons other electorates might draw whether Milei succeeds or fails.
Argentina owes about nine times as much money to the International Monetary Fund as does Colombia (Chile has no IMF program) and is the Fund’s largest debtor, accounting for roughly a third of all outstanding IMF lending. Similarly, for all of Milei’s success at getting Argentina’s runaway inflation under control and bringing it down to 31%, inflation is only about 4-5% in Colombia and Chile.
The incumbent parties in both Colombia and Chile are on the left, suggesting that simple anti-incumbency might be more likely to deliver a result congenial to Washington than the U.S. inserting itself conspicuously in their local campaigns, “continentalizing” their elections, and invoking the Monroe Doctrine.
By all accounts, a previous attempt to do so in Brazil by hitting the country with a headline 50% tariff in retaliation for the criminal conviction of former President Jair Bolsonaro only ended up boosting the popularity of President Lula, even if current polling indicates that the election will very likely be close. But beyond the question of whether attempts to intervene in the elections of other countries can work, such attempts are inadvisable because they draw Washington into the routine domestic politics of other countries and could make American diplomacy far less flexible.
As for the justification that Milei’s victory is essential to keeping China “out” of South America as the references to the Monroe Doctrine suggest, the episode of the soybean sales is a reminder that there is a basic economic complementarity between a country that is hungry for natural resources and a continent that has lots of them. And Milei himself has recognized this reality.
There might be a lesson in recognizing reality here for Washington as well.
Angela Merkel, the eternal pragmatist, has chosen her moment. In a recent interview to Hungarian media, the former German chancellor pointed a finger at Baltic and Polish leaders for their alleged role in “undermining” a potential EU-Russia dialogue before the war.
Whatever one thinks of her legacy, Merkel has an unmatched sense of political timing. Her statement is not a historical aside; it is the opening salvo in Europe’s looming blame game for the impending defeat in Ukraine.
Her comments land at the precise moment the foundational assumptions of Europe’s Ukraine policy are collapsing. On the battlefield, Russian forces are now grinding out slow, but steady gains. In the United States, Donald Trump keeps insisting that this is “Biden’s war,” not his, and that it should end.
While Trump no longer appears to be cajoling Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky into accepting some of Russia Vladimir Putin’s terms, his current position — selling arms to Ukraine funded by Europe — does not satisfy the Europeans as they face increasing economic and fiscal difficulties. Europe finds itself holding a bill it cannot pay and for a war it cannot win — and a war whose strategic direction is being dictated from Washington, not Brussels.
This transatlantic shift is starkly evident in the recent flurry of activity between Trump and Zelensky. Their key topic is the potential provision of U.S. "Tomahawk" cruise missiles to Ukraine. This is a quintessential Trumpian gambit — escalation as a tool for deal-making — but Trump himself does not appear to have decided on the deliveries as he acknowledges this would represent a major escalation. Europe, meanwhile, is left entirely to lobby Trump to make “Biden’s war” his own which highlights the ultimate failure of its own policies.
Consider the plan to seize frozen Russian assets to help Ukraine. While theoretically a massive windfall, estimated at €183 billion of Russian sovereign funds, it is faltering precisely where it matters: in Belgium, where most of those assets are held. Brussels is raising red flags over the legal precedent that would undermine its credibility as a global financial hub and the terrifying prospect of Russian retaliatory strikes on Belgian interests worldwide.
While the European Commission is trying to find a formula that would allow to use the funds while protecting Belgium’s interests, the Belgian government is not yet convinced. Privately, diplomats admit that legal concerns are compounded by Kyiv’s own corruption challenges, highlighted by Zelensky’s recent attempt to abolish an independent anti-corruption body — hardly a confidence-building measure for handing over hundreds of billions.
The EU’s other grand gestures are equally hollow. The attempt to fast-track Ukrainian EU membership collapsed. A scheme championed by the Council President Antonio Costa at the informal EU summit in Copenhagen a few weeks ago to switch to qualified majority voting on enlargement instead of the unanimity rule was blocked by Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
Orbán provides the public “no” vote, but he merely gives political cover for a chorus of objections to Ukraine’s membership across the bloc, including from the new government in the Czech Republic. Addressing the issue, the winner of the elections, Andrej Babis, said Ukraine “was not ready for the EU, and the war had to end first.”
The “drone wall” proposed by the Commission in response to Russia’s repeated alleged violations of EU airspace is mired in the inter-member state scramble that has always limited EU defense integration: the countries in Europe’s south, which do not share the Nordic, Baltic and Polish perceptions of Russia as an existential threat, resent the fact that the proposed “wall” is to be funded by all member states but almost entirely centered on the north’s priorities.
This policy paralysis is mirrored by a crisis of leadership and a crumbling political center. A discontent with the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs, Kaja Kallas, is becoming widespread, even among her allies. Once applauded for her staunch stance on Russia, she is now perceived by many in Brussels and other European capitals as diplomatically inept and monomaniacally hawkish, needlessly undermining the EU’s relations with key players, such as the United States, India and China.
Meanwhile, the domestic foundations of the pro-Ukraine consensus are giving way. France has had four prime ministers in two years, with President Emmanuel Macron deeply unpopular and unable to command a parliamentary majority. A resurgent anti-war bloc spans from the left-wing France Unbowed to the right-wing National Rally, both of which oppose further support to Ukraine. The popularity of each of these parties dwarfs that of Macron’s faction.
In Germany, the Ukraine-skeptic and occasionally openly pro-Russia Alternative for Germany (AfD) is polling at record highs — and according to some surveys, at the same level as Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democratic Union. The new Czech government was elected on a platform explicitly questioning the blank-check approach to Kyiv.
Yet, despite the overwhelming sense of a dead-end, the machinery of European policy grinds on, with a 19th sanctions package against Russia in the works. This is the power of political and bureaucratic inertia — reinforced by Russia’s own reckless escalations consisting in refusal to halt strikes on Ukraine and violations of the EU airspace.
Yet Europe has painted itself into a corner, hoping for a magic wand to alter these dynamics. The latest such fantasy has shifted to American Tomahawk missiles. It is uncertain whether they will even be delivered, and more uncertain still if they would change the military reality. What is certain, as the Kremlin has ominously stated, is that they would dramatically raise the stakes increasing the risk of a direct confrontation between NATO and Russia, with a prospect of a nuclear weapon use.
By refusing to pursue its own diplomatic solutions while simultaneously lobbying Washington for escalatory gambits like Tomahawks, Europe is effectively outsourcing its fate. It is a policy driven by the slogan of supporting the maximalist goals in Ukraine “for as long as it takes,” not strategic foresight. The continent has made itself an active party to a confrontation whose catastrophic consequences it would bear firsthand. When the reckoning comes, the blame game that Angela Merkel has just begun will remain the only policy in full swing.
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Top photo credit: Demonstration raising awareness of the conflict and humanitarian crisis in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo in Brussels in the Brussels Capital province of Belgium on October 8, 2025. (Hans Lucas/Reuters)
Earlier this week, Donald Trump made the bold claim that he’s responsible for ending eight wars since taking office this past January — in other words, nearly one war each month of his presidency.
Among the wars on his list is the decades-long conflict between the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Rwanda, which has mired central Africa since the days of the Rwandan genocide in the 1990s in a quagmire conflict involving over one hundred armed groups.
But despite Trump’s claim, the DRC-Rwanda conflict is not yet over. And despite belligerent actors taking some positive steps to bring about a lasting peace — including Tuesday’s announcement that the Rwanda-supported M23 rebel group and the DRC have agreed on a mechanism to monitor a fragile ceasefire — the war remains an active conflict between the two neighbors and their allied groups.
In June, the foreign ministers of both the DRC and Rwanda sat together in the Oval Office to sign a peace agreement brokered in part by the United States. During the public event, the leaders from both countries lavished praise on the role Trump and his administration had played in securing this deal, and each expressed hope that this would serve as the first major step in ending the conflict.
Though the deal served as a positive step for all parties and great publicity for a White House eager to be seen as brokering peace in conflicts across the globe, there was a glaring omission in the agreement that threatened the durability of the peace from the onset.
The Rwandan-supported M23 rebel group — which is the primary belligerent against the DRC and its allies — was not included in the deal’s negotiations and was not a party to the inked agreement. The M23 has said that any deal between the DRC and Rwanda is merely an agreement between those two countries, and does not apply to them.
The success of the agreement, therefore, depends on getting M23 to agree to end its hostilities towards the DRC. This would happen if Rwanda tried to rein in the group by stopping or limiting its supply of materials to M23 and ending its logistical support for the group’s operations.
In the weeks following the signing ceremony, the DRC and M23 engaged in discussions in Doha, Qatar, mediated primarily by the Qataris. The talks led to an initial ceasefire and a framework agreement for a long-term peace deal between the two sides on July 19, which stated that negotiations for a final, long-term peace deal would begin on August 8 and conclude with an agreement signed no later than August 18.
But since the July 19 agreement, fighting has continued between the M23 rebels and the DRC, as well as with the many other rebel groups a part of the conflict.
As evidence that M23 is not the only major group involved in the war, on July 27, the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) — another armed group fighting against the DRC — killed at least 40 Christians worshiping at a Congolese church. This came days after the ADF killed 82 civilians in eastern Congo.
And between July 10 and July 30, M23 was responsible for killing at least 140 people near the Virunga National Park in eastern DRC, including at least 14 people cut down by machetes. This is in addition to at least 319 people killed by M23 between July 9 and July 21 across four villages in eastern DRC.
In both sets of attacks, M23 continued to fight and kill for days after the July 19 ceasefire agreement was signed. Earlier this month the DRC government accused M23 of killing “hundreds” of people through “assassinations and summary executions” in September — weeks after the initial ceasefire agreement was adopted.
Long-term negotiations have sputtered. August 18 came and went without a final peace deal, as disagreements between the two sides on whether the initial framework required the M23 to fully withdraw from territory it had conquered proved to be an impasse in negotiations.
With the war continuing past stated deadlines, earlier this week the United Nations’ (UN) special envoy for the Great Lakes region of Africa, Huang Xia, said that while the peace efforts to end the war “are commendable and promising, they have not yet delivered on their promises: the agreed ceasefire is not being respected.”
In a major positive step towards a permanent ceasefire and lasting peace, on Tuesday the DRC and M23 agreed to form a monitoring body which will oversee the ceasefire between the two sides. The agreement came after weeks of negotiations primarily mediated and hosted by Qatar, with the United States also participating in discussions. The monitoring body is composed of representatives from the DRC, M23, and the 12-member regional body for that area known as the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region. In addition, representatives from Qatar, the United States, and African Union will be a part of the monitoring team.
This monitoring body is one of two steps required before the two could start negotiating the long-term peace deal, per the July framework agreement. The other is a prisoner swap. Although it was agreed to in September, the exchange has yet to take place.
Ending a war in which many rebel groups have joined rival factions to fight in a decades-long conflict stemming from a genocide is far easier said than done.
Trump’s focus on peace is in the right place. But his claim that his administration has successfully “ended the war” disintegrates in the face of continued fighting and killing in the eastern DRC. More work will be required from the president’s team to propel this process over the finish line.
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