Marco Rubio’s Press Conference Was A Success In The Modern Diplomatic Sense

The American secretary of state arrived in New Delhi at a moment when India’s relationship with Washington resembles a heavily leveraged arranged marriage: strategically indispensable, commercially tense, and one tariff tantrum away from emotional collapse. The band baja you hear in the background is the din of Trump’s stupid Iran war and the appreciatively rising prices. Therefore, much premium was placed on the press interaction, this time, thankfully, with questions. The entire spectacle lasted 53 minutes. Roughly 18 of those were consumed by opening remarks and ceremonial pleasantries, some of them delivered by our much esteemed External Affairs minister, S. Jaishankar, in his trademark manner of polished opacity. The remaining 35 minutes constituted what passed for a press interaction. Jaishankar made what seems to be a Freudian slip. Without quite explaining why, he announced a sharp uptick in American energy purchases, as though India had suddenly developed a spontaneous and mysterious craving undecipherable to local strategic pundits. Questions naturally swirl. Is India exhibiting more strategic autonomy by doing so? What exactly does Donald Trump mean when he repeatedly and insistently claims credit for separating India and Pakistan? How does he know how many planes were shot down and why does the number keep fluctuating? Alas, we got no clarity from the first Marco Rubio press interaction in these parts. But hey, he did announce Venezuelan acting chief, Delcy Rodriguez, who is pretty much a puppet to Trump’s whims, would visit India. Our chaps are yet to get there but they will someday soon, hopefully before the visit. Rubio presented this information with the solemnity of a papal communiqué, to an audience trying to decipher whether America’s real export nowadays is LNG or regime change.

Yet, the true entertainment lay not in the answers but in the questions. India’s press corps, which can display astonishing ferocity in television studios at 9pm, approached Rubio with the cautious reverence of courtiers offering out of season exotic mangoes to a Mughal emperor. One especially heroic inquiry looped around itself so thoroughly that Rubio appeared baffled. Then came the line of the evening. “Every country in the world has stupid people,” Rubio replied. Well said, Marco! But whom did he mean? The possibilities are deliciously broad. Perhaps he referred to the journalist whose question induced the remark. Perhaps Rubio was subconsciously revisiting his own long and colourful war with Donald Trump. During the 2016 Republican primaries, Rubio portrayed Trump as a “con artist”, mocked his temperament, ridiculed his business failures, and made big jokes about his small hand size. Trump, for his part, once amplified remarks describing India as a “hellhole”, while routinely treating allies as contestants in an endless reality show. The press conference ultimately succeeded in the modern diplomatic sense: everyone smiled, nothing exploded and ambiguity was preserved for future use.