Leaving the Valley for the High Country
When Marco Rubio accepted the post of United States Secretary of State in January, he stepped into terrain that few of his peers survive intact. He entered a wilderness of power and principle, where old markers of loyalty and ideology fade, leaving only survival's raw code.
I rewatched Jeremiah Johnson, the 1972 flick in which Robert Redford's weary soldier leaves civilization to test his mettle in the unyielding mountains.
Following a similar trace, Rubio's journey began as the polished Senate reformer who preached bipartisanship and global cooperation; he's since become Washington's mountain man. Instead of a Hawken rifle, he's armed with a mandate to strip America's foreign policy down to its bare essentials.
The Man Before the Mountain
Rubio began his career as a young conservative firebrand who emphasized immigration reform, a broader foreign policy vision, and a bipartisan posture. As comfortable as the Senate was, Rubio walked on known terrain, but when he joined the Trump administration, he entered a completely different valley.
Looming like uncharted peaks, the bureaucracies of the State Department shifted the global map he once trusted beneath him. The wilderness welcomed him, but it demanded adaptation.
Cutting a New Trail
Rubio announced sweeping reforms of the State Department in April, cutting about 15% of domestic staff and over 700 positions.
“Too much of diplomacy,” he said, “has become ideology over common sense."
In his view, what once was a network of offices and programs became a tangle of overgrown trails, and his answer was to quickly clear it.
The Wilderness Bites Back
But the wilderness demands trade-offs before entering it. The overhaul in July extended to Asia policy, where more than 1,100 civil servants and 240 Foreign Service officers were dismissed, including an entire office tied to technology competition with China.
What Rubio sells as lean resilience, his critics call a costly retreat. The mountain man stripped his gear, but kept his rifle; Rubio stripped bureaucracy, but the rifle remains America's global influence, and some worry it's out of bullets.
The Moral Wilderness
There's a looming moral question: Is Rubio creating a new path of frontier honesty or forsaking community for self-reliance?
The solitary man myth, which survives in the wild, valorizes independence, grit, and authenticity. Despite the myth's strength, the real world demands coalitions, institutions, and collective strategy.
In Jeremiah Johnson, his solitude becomes his strength and his curse; he wins his freedom but loses his family to vengeance. The solitude Rubio holds in D.C. carries the same tension: freedom from bureaucracy, but isolation from consensus.
Manhood, Humility, and the Thin Air of Power
Rubio's transformation reveals the cost of masculinity in the wilderness, trading his earlier posture as an engaged policymaker for the gruffer role of rebuilder —the man clearing the forest rather than planting trees.
He proclaimed that every bureaucratic dollar needs to answer one question: Does it make America safer, stronger, and more prosperous?
The trail he walks is along a ridge line, with clarity rather than complexity, and purpose rather than process.
But the air becomes thinner the higher you climb the mountain, and the view demands humility as much as strength.
Final Thoughts
In the end, Jeremiah Johnson didn't conquer the wilderness; he learned to live with it, and his final nod to the Crow chief was an acknowledgment that survival and peace can coexist.
If Rubio can turn his solitude into stewardship rather than defiance, then his story may end the same way. Whether his mountain yields wisdom or exile determines how his name is remembered, not just in Washington, but in the moral wilderness of power itself.
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