Two hats for Marco Rubio—but for how long?

Secretary of State is now acting National Security Advisor amid rumours it could be a long-term solution

One out, none in?

When Michael Waltz was heard to be leaving his position as US National Security Advisor last Thursday, it wasn’t entirely surprising. There had been whispers for some time that he had not fitted into the role, or rather into the wider circle of President Donald Trump’s dysfunctional court, and he was, technically, the person responsible for adding editor-in-chief of The Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg to a group conversation which became the Signalgate scandal. Someone, surely, had to be at least nominally held to account, and Waltz seemed the most likely sacrificial lamb. Then, catching not only journalists and commentators but also State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce off guard, Trump revealed that he would nominate Waltz to be the United States Permanent Representative to the United Nations. (I wrote about the day’s events in The Spectator here.)

One corollary of these events was that the United States Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, is now acting National Security Advisor until a replacement for Waltz is chosen. This may—or may not, as I’ll explain—indicate that the President had not devised a plan to remove Waltz but was, characteristically, improvising and reacting to events as they unfolded. Unlike in the UK, where ministers are almost always replaced in the same sequence of events that involves their departure, it is quite normal for executive positions in the US government to be held on an acting basis between substantive appointments, sometimes for some length of time.

That said, Rubio, as head of the State Department and the most senior cabinet officer, was a strange choice to take over ad interim. More usually, one would expect the Deputy National Security Advisor, or at least another senior figure from within the National Security Council staff, to hold the fort, as had happened with Charles Kupperman (2019), Alton Keel (1986) and James Nance (1981-82). However, the Principal Deputy National Security Advisor, Alex Wong, was also dismissed, and one of the problems Waltz had encountered at the NSC was the number of appointments he had been prevented from making because other presidential advisers did not approve of the candidates. There had also been several dismissals already as part of a wider purge of government.

So the task fell to Rubio. It is not, in fact, his second hat, but his fourth: the Secretary of State has also been Acting Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) since February as Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has all but gutted the institution, as well as Acting Archivist of the United States following the firing of Colleen Joy Shogan. But the intention is to scrap USAID altogether in its current form so it is in a winding-up phase, while the position of Archivist, while enormously important, is less likely to present sudden challenges which have to be addressed.

Temporary expedient or long-term strategy?

There is a school of thought which says that this is not accidental or spontaneous at all, and that it is the President’s long-term plan to have Rubio occupy both offices. Politico reports that he will double-hat for at least six months, and that White House officials have said anonymously that Trump and his Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles, want Rubio to take “more fulsome control” of foreign policy. It has been noted repeatedly that Dr Henry Kissinger, who had been appointed National Security Advisor by President Nixon at the beginning of the administration in 1969, succeeded the largely redundant and ineffectual William Rogers as Secretary of State in September 1973, but retained both roles, first under Nixon and then under President Ford, for 25 months before handing the former post over to his deputy, Lieutenant General Brent Scowcroft, in November 1975.

If that is Trump’s intention, and the underlying motivation is to bring more coherence and coordination to the administration’s foreign policy, that is a worthwhile objective, whether or not the method is correct. Until Waltz’s departure last week, foreign affairs were being influenced in various ways by an eclectic assortment of people: not only Rubio and Waltz, but Vice-President J.D. Vance, Wiles as White House Chief of Staff, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Steve Witkoff, Trump’s long-standing friend and golf partner who is Special Envoy to the Middle East but has also recently been given responsibility for negotiations with Russia over the conflict in Ukraine. That is a crowded field, and one which contains some helplessly unqualified and inadequate incumbents, and it will not improve the quality of decision-making in foreign policy terms.

I should say at this stage that I have no particular objection as a matter of principle to officials holding more than one position concurrently. Maybe it’s my training as a Tudor historian, long familiar with pluralist priests and bishops in the Catholic Church, that makes me relaxed about it, or the context of British politics in which every minister in the House of Commons has at least two jobs, as a constituency MP and as a member of the government. It’s also worth noting that, although the parallel is not exact, Sir Mark Sedwill, having served 18 months as National Security Adviser under Theresa May, took on the additional (usually full-time) role as Secretary to the Cabinet in October 2018 after the sudden death of Sir Jeremy Heywood, and combined the posts for nearly two years until he was eased into retirement by Boris Johnson. Sedwill said the arrangement would provide a “genuine sense of teamwork across and beyond government”, though it was widely thought more pertinent that he was one of the few civil servants the reserved and detached Theresa May genuinely trusted. (there was also speculation that she was keeping the position of National Security Adviser for her then-adviser on Europe and chief Brexit negotiator Olly Robbins (now Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office).

I thought at the time that it was unwise for Sedwill—a very able and experienced civil servant—to combine both positions. This was not a matter of principle or constitutional propriety, but simply because I doubted, I think rightly, that any single person had the time and attention, the “bandwidth” in the current jargon, to be Cabinet Secretary (and therefore Head of the Civil Service) and National Security Adviser adequately and thoroughly. That said, when the role of National Security Adviser had been created in 2010, it had taken many of its duties from the Cabinet Secretary, including advising the Prime Minister on issues of national security, coordinating the work of the intelligence and security agencies and oversight of the Single Intelligence Account. But it is a strange law of bureaucracy that disaggregated elements of a single post soon seem to develop into portfolios too large and individually burdensome to reunite at a later date; it is the administrative equivalent of trying to get toothpaste back in the tube.

Before we judge the wisdom or otherwise of combining, even if only personally and temporarily rather than institutionally, the positions of Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, it is worth reiterating briefly what each of them does.

The Secretary of State

The Secretary of State can be traced back to the beginning of the United States. In January 1781, the Continental Congress established a Department of Foreign Affairs, and in August the Congress of the Confederation, which had replaced it as the legislative body of the United States, elected Robert Livingston, Chancellor of New York, as Secretary of Foreign Affairs. His responsibilities included dealing with representatives of foreign powers, communication with US ministers abroad and transmitting the instructions of the Congress to those ministers. Following the ratification of the Constitution of the United States in 1788, the 1st US Congress legislated in July 1789 to confirm the position of the Department of Foreign Affairs, and in September passed another act redesignating it as the Department of State and giving the Secretary of State, as he was now to be called, the additional duties of the safekeeping of the acts, records and Seal of the United States.

The role of foreign minister and adviser on foreign affairs to the President has remained broadly the same since the reordering of the Department of State in 1789. Interestingly, this coincided almost exactly with the reorganisation of the government in Britain in 1782, when the Northern and Southern Departments, each headed by a Secretary of State, were translated into the Foreign Office and Home Office respectively and their duties adjusted accordingly. The United States Secretary of State is also the highest-ranking member of the cabinet, the third most senior official in the executive branch of the federal government after the President and Vice-President, and fourth in the presidential line of succession after the Vice-President, the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President pro tempore of the Senate.

While most of the Secretary of State’s domestic duties have been transferred elsewhere over the years, he retains some formal responsibilities for protocol and relating to the use of the Great Seal of the United States. One manifestation of this was during the resignations of Vice-President Spiro Agnew in October 1973 and then President Richard Nixon in August 1974: under federal law, such a resignation is only valid if presented in writing in an instrument to the office of the Secretary of State, which meant that both resignations were formally notified to and received by Henry Kissinger (who had become Secretary of State in September 1973).

Six secretaries of state have gone on to be President of the United States: Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, Martin van Buren and James Buchanan. It is worth noting, however, that all held the presidency before the Civil War, in the 160 years since which no Secretary of State has progressed to the White House, although Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Lewis Cass, James Blaine and Hillary Clinton were all unsuccessful candidates for the presidency after serving as Secretary of State. It is also an office which has subsequently been given to failed presidential candidates or candidates for their parties’ nomination, a halfway house between recognition of status and consolation prize.

Like foreign ministers in many Western democracies, the Secretary of State is increasingly subject to pressures from a number of directions. On the one hand, he or she is inevitably a senior member of the administration for institutional reasons, because of the public profile of foreign affairs and because of the high media profile foreign ministers tend to enjoy. On the other hand, two major factors serve to constrain the position: the first, again common to many Western democracies, is the growing desire and capacity of the head of government (in the case of the US, the President) to take a close and direct personal interest in the stewardship of foreign affairs, which inevitably deprives the Secretary of State of some autonomy; the second is the degree to which the demarcations between foreign affairs, defence and military matters, international economic and commercial issues, overseas assistance and the broad catch-all of “national security” have become blurred. It is much more difficult for any foreign ministry now, compared to, say, a century ago to identify a major issue which is exclusively within its purview.

The National Security Advisor

That blurring of boundaries brings us neatly to the establishment of the second office. In 1947, Congress passed the National Security Act, one of the objectives of which was “the coordination of the activities of the National Military Establishment with other departments and agencies of the Government concerned with the national security”. The National Military Establishment (NME) was headed by a new post of Secretary of Defense (to which James Forrestal was appointed) and was an attempt to learn lessons from the experience of the Second World War and eliminate wasteful and inefficient inter-departmental and inter-service rivalry. by bringing the armed services closer together. Initially the NME had relatively weak control over the Department of the Army (formerly the Department of War), the Department of the Navy and the Department of the Air Force, the secretaries of which all retained cabinet rank, but in August 1949 the National Security Act was amended to reshape the NME as the Department of Defense into which the three service departments were formally merged, leaving only the Secretary of Defense as a member of the cabinet.

The act also created the National Security Council (NSC) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to improve and coordinate policy analysis and decision-making. The NSC was to be chaired by the President and included the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense, and its purpose was to provide a forum within which the competing demands of foreign, diplomatic, intelligence and military policy could be reconciled and aligned. From 1949, it was based in the Executive Office of the President, giving it in effect the additional role of extending the President’s institutional influence in those areas of policy alongside the Departments of State and Defense.

Initially, the senior official at the NSC was its Executive Secretary, a primarily administrative position in charge of the staff and bureaucracy and acting as a point of contact with other government bodies. In November 1952, however, General of the Army Dwight Eisenhower, former Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force (1944-45), Chief of Staff of the United States Army (1945-48) and Supreme Allied Commander Europe (1951-52) was elected President, and brought a well-developed and thoroughly tested military style of management to the White House. When he assumed the presidency in January 1953, he appointed Robert Cutler, a writer and attorney who had been his personal secretary during the election campaign, as Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (still the National Security Advisor’s formal title).

In March 1953, Cutler prepared a memorandum for Eisenhower which proposed expanding and reforming the NSC and its staff to make them more effective as “a mechanism to aid the President in formulating national security policy”. The document, which Eisenhower approved and which required no statutory changes, conceived of the National Security Advisor as “the principal executive officer” of the NSC, determining the agenda, briefing the President, chairing the Planning Board, supervising the overall work of the NSC through the Executive Secretary and inspecting, on the President’s behalf, the progress of implementation of policy by cabinet members and advising the President accordingly. He would be an advisory rather than a participant member of the National Security Council and would not, under any circumstances, chair its meetings; if the President was unavailable, that role should fall to the Vice-President or the Secretary of State.

This establishment gave the post of National Security Advisor the distinctive features it has generally retained. The incumbent does not exercise formal executive power but derives influence partly through his or her administrative role but mainly through the close advisory relationship with the President. Being part of the Executive Office of the President, he is physically much closer to the President and enjoys much more regular contact, formally and informally, that the heads of departments like the Secretary of State or the Secretary of Defense; they, of course, have control over much larger staffs and have much greater institutional powers. Equally, the National Security Advisor or the Deputy National Security Advisor will generally be with the President at all times.

The structure of the National Security Council’s apparatus and the National Security Advisor’s place in it has been amended several times, especially in recent years. Cutler’s initial model in 1953 was based on the five statutory members of the council—President, Vice-President, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, Director of the Office of Defense Mobilization—with the attendance when required of individuals like the Secretary of the Treasury, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Director of Central Intelligence. The Eisenhower-era NSC was strongly influenced by two factors, the President’s military background, which gave it many aspects of the staff function of a general headquarters, and a desire for efficiency and good management derived from the private sector, as Eisenhower’s cabinet included a number of leading businessmen.

Kennedy and Johnson preferred less formal and structured policy analysis and decision-making, dealing directly with the National Security Advisor and other senior officials rather than engaging as closely as Eisenhower had with the bureaucracy. Under Nixon, Kissinger focused more on collecting and analysing large amounts of information and data in order to produce detailed and well-informed options on foreign policy issues for the President. Reagan’s tenure in the White House saw the National Security Advisor fade in influence as more power was accrued by Reagan’s successive Chiefs of Staff.

George H.W. Bush, with personal foreign policy experience as former Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Chief of the US Liaison Office (de facto ambassador) to China and Director of Central Intelligence, restored a more collegiate atmosphere to the NSC and made significant reforms. He established a Principals Committee, a Deputies Committee and eight Policy Coordinating Committees, a structure which endures to this day. Regular attenders who also sit on the Principals Committee now include the Secretary of Energy, the Attorney General, the Secretary of Homeland Security, the White House Chief of Staff, the Director of National Intelligence, the Homeland Security Advisor and the Permanent Representative to the UN.

A brief reorganisation at the beginning of Trump’s first presidency saw the Director of National Intelligence, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the Director of the CIA downgraded from regular members of the Principals Committee to attending when necessary, and the White House Chief Strategist, Steve Bannon, joined the NSC. These changes were reversed after three months.

Advisory influence v. statutory authority

Political history offers no shortage of advisory figures with little executive power who have come to wield much more influence than their institutionally stronger colleagues, both in foreign affairs and beyond: Colonel Edward House under Woodrow Wilson, Harry Hopkins under Franklin D. Roosevelt, Brendan Bracken and Lord Cherwell under Winston Churchill, Sir Alan Walters and Charles Powell under Margaret Thatcher. The model of the éminence grise was set, in many ways which still apply, by the original “grey cardinal”, Père Joseph (François Leclerc du Tremblay), the Capuchin friar who was an ally and confidant of Armand Cardinal de Richelieu, Louis XIII’s chief minister (1624-42). The influence can be extensive but is personal, dependent on the relationship with the head of state or government, and is therefore always insecure.

There have been several National Security Advisors who have used this kind of personal bond and been powerful figures in American administrations. Cutler is of course one, a driven, highly emotional workaholic who relied on Dexedrine to stay awake and Seconal to sleep. He also had to navigate the minefield of being homosexual at the height of the Lavender Scare over the employment of gay men in the federal government, fuelled by the great witch-hunter Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin (who was himself in secret probably bisexual if not homosexual). Cutler was firm and forthright, and enjoyed a very close relationship with Eisenhower, but he also regarded his post as an essentially administrative and coordinating one, and he made no attempt to impinge on the territory of the State Department. John Foster Dulles, the Secretary of State from 1953 until a month before his death in 1959, was a meticulous Princeton- and George Washington-educated lawyer with considerable international experience, partly through the patronage of his uncle, Secretary of State Robert Lansing. He was one of the most powerful figures in the Eisenhower administration, sceptical of the NSC and jealous of his role as foreign policy chief, but with Cutler observing boundaries carefully they coexisted without incident.

(Dulles’s hand was perhaps strengthened by the fact that his younger brother, Allen, was Director of Central Intelligence and therefore a principal member of the NSC.) from 1953 to 1961.)

Other obvious examples would McGeorge Bundy (1961-66) under Kennedy and Johnson, Henry Kissinger (1969-75) under Nixon and Ford, Brent Scowcroft (1989-93) in his second period under George H.W. Bush, Dr Condoleezza Rice (2001-05) under George W. Bush and Jake Sullivan (2021-25) under Biden. Each had a degree of influence over American foreign and security policy at least roughly on a par with the Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense of the time (and Kissinger was concurrently Secretary of State himself from 1973 to 1975).

One advantage which the National Security Advisor enjoys over the Secretary of State is the other side of the weakness I touched on, that deriving power from an informal personal relationship is necessarily insecure. That informality can also give a degree of leeway which cabinet members do not have; the duties and responsibilities of the Secretary of State are clearly defined, as are those of his colleagues, so while he can protect his own bailiwick effectively with the backing of statute, he is simultaneously constrained from ranging more widely. The Secretary of Defense, for example, is part of the military chain of command, second only to the President, with legal authority of command and control over the armed forces (which the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff explicitly does not have), so it would be extremely difficult for a Secretary of State to stray very far into the sphere of military affairs.

If cabinet members have narrow powers that are also institutionally deep, the National Security Advisor has shallower, more informal authority but its extent is much wider. He is, after all “Assistant to the President”, who is the chief executive of the federal government, and his remit as the principal officer of the National Security Council gives him an interest as far as the definition of “national security” will stretch—and it has tended to stretch further and further over the past decades, as governments seek to recognise and absorb the extent to which superficially discrete areas of policy are interconnected.

Our understandable but profound cynicism towards the political process should not lead us to think that conflict, power struggles and skulduggery are the inevitable outcome of two competing polarities like the Secretary of State and the National Security Advisor. Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, who held the offices all the way through the Biden administration, had a smooth and effective rapport, which also extended to the Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin III; Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley cooperated without incident for all of George W. Bush’s second term, assisted by the fact that Hadley had been Deputy National Security Advisor under Rice in Bush’s first term; George Shultz (Secretary of State 1982-89) and General Colin Powell (National Security Advisor 1987-89) had a complex relationship and approached policy from very different perspectives but forged a productive partnership in the last years of the Reagan presidency; Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft worked well from 1975 to 1979 under Gerald Ford, though Scowcroft, like Hadley, above, had of course been Kissinger’s deputy at the National Security Council immediately before he became National Security Advisor.

It has been more difficult to discern a pattern under Donald Trump’s presidency because his first administration had such a high rate of turnover of officials at all levels and was, to a very large extent, chronically dysfunctional. Rex Tillerson, former CEO of ExxonMobil, was Secretary of State for 14 months from January 2017 but it was not a happy period; Tillerson had no experience in diplomacy or public policy and barely knew President Trump, his candidacy being advocated by Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner with the imprimatur of Condoleezza Rice and former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates; by the summer of 2017 Tillerson had already come to form a low opinion of the President, reportedly describing him as a “fucking moron”; and Trump dismissed him in March 2018, characteristically announcing the decision on social media. He was replaced by the Director of the CIA , Mike Pompeo, a more seasoned figure in political terms who had also represented Kansas in the House of Representatives from 2011 to 2017. Pompeo was a staunch supporter of the President, frequently breaking convention, protocol or rules in pursuit of Trump’s political objectives, which led two foreign policy experts to name him as “the worst secretary of state of modern times”.

The turnover at the National Security Council in Trump’s first administration was even higher. His first choice for National Security Advisor, Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, was forced to resign after 24 days, having lied about contact and discussions with the Russian Ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak. Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, a very able and highly respected military officer serving as Deputy Commanding General of the US Army Training and Doctrine Command, was appointed and served for just over a year then resigned as media reports grew that Trump intended to dismiss him at some point. John Bolton, the hawkish and controversial former US Permanent Representative to the United Nations, then lasted almost 18 months as National Security Advisor. He initially wielded considerable influence then found himself in conflict with the President more and more often until he either resigned or was fired, depending on which account you believe, in October 2019. For the last 18 months of the first Trump administration, the post was occupied by Robert O’Brien, a lawyer who had worked for the State Department, advised Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign in 2012, been considered by Trump for Secretary of the Navy in 2017 and then been Special Envoy for Hostage Affairs (2018-19).

Trump’s intensely personal and mercurial style of presidency makes a conventional assessment of the relations between the Secretary of State and the National Security Advisor difficult. Tillerson was not an effective head of the State Department by temperament or experience, and his lack of rapport with the President only made that worse. At best, he was regarded as weak, while Daniel Drezner of Tufts University described him in The Washington Post as “an unmitigated disaster”. Pompeo was much more closely aligned with Trump, often to a degree which crossed into impropriety, and was able to be much more active, even if the results were often negative.

Of the three people who were National Security Advisor for any length of time, none was a natural ally of Trump: McMaster regarded the role as an extension of his public service as an officer of the US Army; Bolton, although considered for Secretary of State or Deputy Secretary of State in 2016 and as a possible replacement for Flynn in 2017, was too independent-minded and self-assured to spend very long at Trump’s side; O’Brien was regarded as a traditional foreign policy conservative, and although he came to be in some ways positive about the President, it is notable that he refused to endorse the “stolen election” theory in 2020/21.

Marco Rubio and the potential of uniting the roles

The nomination of Senator Marco Rubio of Florida as Secretary of State was one of the least controversial of Donald Trump’s choices when he returned to the presidency. He had served on the Committee on Foreign Relations since 2013 and been ranking member of the Select Committee on Intelligence, and was regarded as having been influential on the policy of the first Trump administration towards China and Latin America. Both the Foreign Relations Committee and the full Senate approved his nomination as Secretary of State unanimously.

Rubio’s relationship with Donald Trump has been more complex. He sought the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in 2016 and therefore was one of Trump’s competitors, and criticism flowed in both directions. Trump’s was, inevitably, cruder and more ad hominem, and frequently referred to Rubio dismissively as “Li’l Marco”. However, Rubio subsequently supported Trump’s candidacy and was generally aligned with the administration from 2017 to 2021. He is especially hawkish on China, but has also moderated his previous forthright support for Ukraine and condemnation of Russia to fit more neatly with Trump’s views.

As Secretary of State, Rubio has been noted, and praised by the President, for his loyalty and effectiveness. “He’s just a quintessential team player that is willing to accept whatever task is necessary to deliver for the president—including the hard or risky ones,” a White House official told Politico recently.

You need a team player who is very honest with the president and the senior team—not someone trying to build an empire or wield a knife or drive their own agenda. He is singularly focused on delivering the president’s agenda.

That conspicuously eager loyalty has played well with Trump, a man who enjoys visible displays of homage. The President, speaking to journalists last week, remarked “When I have a problem, I call up Marco. He gets it solved.” Rubio is also said to have been careful to avoid territorial disputes with other officials in the foreign policy arena, like the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, Susie Wiles, the White House Chief of Staff, and Vice-President J.D. Vance. His relationship with Wiles, a fellow Floridian, is said to be particularly good.

One White House official explained to Politico that putting the roles of Secretary of State and National Security Advisor into the same hands makes a great deal of sense.

One is the convener, gatherer of facts, and articulator of policy. And the other is the diplomatic lead. I realized they may be more complementary than I thought.

This is not wholly inaccurate. After all, the National Security Advisor’s post was not established to create friction around the President but to perform a function that was not at that point being carried out at all. The conduct of the roles has varied enormously according to their occupants, but the Secretary of State is a senior member of cabinet who requires Senate confirmation and has direct authority over 80,000 employees; the National Security Advisor manages an institution with only a few hundred members of staff and works principally on policy and preparing a range of options for the President in any given situation. There is a degree of complementarity, and perhaps uniting the two roles will bring better coordination in some areas.

There are two principal reasons that Rubio’s double-hatted status is a bad idea and should not last for longer than is necessary. The first is straightforward diminution of capacity: however able Rubio is, and however hard he is willing to work, there remain 24 hours in a day and he holds two roles (strictly four but for the moment let’s discount USAID and the National Archives) each of which has in the past often required incumbents of ability and tirelessness. It is unavoidable logic that dictates he will be able to do less than his predecessors if he retains both roles, which means either the work must be delegated—not in itself a bad thing—or it goes undone, there is simply less thinking, less analysis, less time consulting with colleagues, less time performing leadership functions. That seems a considerable disadvantage, particularly at a time of heightened global tensions, and given that the administration, as Trump’s first presidency was, is proving slow to make some appointments (the NSC in particular has several important vacancies).

The more fundamental objection to the dual role is that is strips the position of National Security Advisor of some of its basic purpose. While the Secretary of State is the President’s chief adviser on foreign affairs, the National Security Advisor has often been able to provide a different perspective on issues, because of different backgrounds and experiences, different analysis of information and a wider range of policy responsibilities. That is not to say one is better than the other, but the existence of both jobs has given the President a degree of diversity of opinion to inform his foreign policy decisions. That manifestly cannot happen if Rubio occupies both positions: the State Department and the NSA will still both exist and function in their different ways, and may come to different conclusions or recommendations, but their output will be filtered through the same person, and that will deaden the diversity of thought and analysis.

What’s next?

Given Trump’s unpredictable nature, it may be that Rubio turns out only to hold the NSC fort for a short time; the President might take a sudden liking to someone and make them National Security Advisor, or reach another unforeseen decision about staff allocation and institutional arrangements. He is not a man who will have thought deeply in structural terms about how he would best served for foreign policy advice, because that is not the kind of subject that has ever interested him and his attention span is too short and too fragile to come to any substantive conclusions. But he does have a knack for seeing and exploiting relationships between others, like a mediaeval monarch managing his courtiers and their competing ambitions. That is likely to be Trump’s overriding motivation at the moment: by suggesting he would like Rubio to hold both posts for a substantial period of time, he neutralises the appointment process for a new National Security Advisor and can, if he chooses, manipulate any who might aspire to the office. The President’s time as host of The Apprentice is never too far from his mind.