Hey, Dexter.

Hey, Tyler.

Marco Rubio is one of only two people to concurrently serve as U.S. Secretary of State and as National Security Advisor.

The other is Henry Kissinger, who, depending on whom you ask, is either one of the most effective or notorious figures in the history of U.S. foreign policy.

Do you think that Rubio has the chance to wield the kind of power and influence that Kissinger did?

God, that's a great question. No. I think it's a different world, but more important, I think it's just a

completely different administration. So if you look at Kissinger, I mean, he was a giant. He roamed

the world. He was intervening everywhere. He won the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating peace in the

Middle East. He opened China to the United States and to the West. He negotiated arms control with the Soviet Union. I mean, he was, you know, plenty of people loathe Henry Kissinger, but he was, that's because he did so much. Yeah, they loathe him, but they don't deny his power. Yeah, or they don't deny his accomplishments. And so you might disagree with some of those,

but he's an extraordinary figure in post-war history. But he worked for, you know, two different

presidents, Nixon and Ford. And I think this is just a very different, we live in a very different time now.

And it's, and I think this is, look, I think this is the first and foremost, this is the foreign policy of Donald J. Trump,

and Marco Rubio has kind of found his much smaller place, his much smaller perch in that galaxy.

That's Dexter Filkins, a staff writer at the New Yorker who recently profiled Marco Rubio.

As Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, Rubio now occupies a role of extraordinary power,

one that places him at the center of Donald Trump's second term, which has been marked by an increasingly aggressive and unilateral approach to foreign policy.

Although Rubio came into the Trump administration with well-documented views and priorities that

differed from Trump's, it's unclear to what extent Rubio has influenced Trump's foreign policy

goals or molded himself according to Trump's whims and whether it's all part of a larger pattern

of political opportunism. I wanted to talk with Dexter about Rubio's influence on Trump's whims, and whether it's all part of a larger pattern of political opportunism.

I wanted to talk with Dexter about Rubio's influence on Trump's escalation in Venezuela and what

it signals for U.S. policy in Latin America. I also wanted to talk about how Rubio made the

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