Monica Duffy Toft, Tufts University

U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, will testify before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee as part of his confirmation process on Jan. 15, 2025.

Rubio’s nomination is remarkable for several reasons, including the fact that Rubio has been a harsh critic of Trump.

But the relationship between Trump and Rubio has improved in recent years, so much so that Rubio was a finalist to serve as Trump’s running mate in 2024. Rubio would also be the first Latino to serve in this important role.

The secretary of state is one of the most important U.S. government Cabinet positions, and the secretary of state is fourth in line for the presidency.

In my work as a scholar of international affairs, I’ve seen how secretaries of state have had lasting impact on U.S. foreign policy and how the rest of the world perceives the U.S.

Secretaries of state who left their mark

Thomas Jefferson, who served as the first U.S. secretary of state from 1790 through 1793, laid the groundwork for U.S. diplomacy. He helped establish the U.S. as a sovereign country and advocated for neutrality during European conflicts. This allowed the nascent nation to develop its interests without foreign entanglements.

Jefferson also advocated for diplomacy over war and thought that negotiations should be used to resolve conflict. Jefferson wrote in a 1799 letter, “I am for free commerce with all nations, political connection with none, & little or no diplomatic establishment: and I am not for linking ourselves, by new treaties with the quarrels of Europe, entering that field of slaughter to preserve their balance.”

Centuries later, World War II elevated another secretary of state, George C. Marshall, who served from January 1947 through January 1949.

Marshall designed the strategy – aptly called the Marshall Plan – that rebuilt and stabilized Europe after World War II, blunting communism’s spread and solidifying an alliance between a Western bloc of countries. As a result of his work, Marshall received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953.

The incoming secretary of state in 2025 will face critical challenges, including multiple wars across the world, as well as the potential threat of a nuclear confrontation with Iran or other countries.

This tough job demands significant intelligence, knowledge and grit.

The role of the secretary of state

Above all, the secretary of state is the country’s top diplomat. The secretary oversees and implements all of the president’s foreign policies through the State Department, which includes several agencies, including the Foreign Service.

The secretary of state is also the president’s top adviser on foreign policy. The secretary gives the president updates and recommendations on how a foreign policy decision might be tackled.

The secretary also regularly speaks with different heads of state, ambassadors and foreign ministers to deal with global challenges and crises, and to negotiate international treaties or ceasefire deals.

A day in the life

On a day-to-day basis, the secretary oversees a large bureaucracy, with over 69,000 employees, including ambassadors, foreign service officers and other workers stationed in more than 270 embassies, consulates and missions worldwide.

The secretary’s daily schedule might include morning meetings and updates from senior officials, intelligence agencies or regional experts on ongoing crises. In Washington, D.C., the secretary will also host or attend meetings with ambassadors and foreign dignitaries or with leaders from Congress.

The secretary also reviews budgets, personnel decisions and the many reports that U.S. embassies and other offices overseas produce about the political situations in other countries and regions.

The secretary of state is charged with resolving global conflicts and helping maintain peace. This involves frequent travel abroad to meet with various foreign counterparts.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, for example, traveled in February and March 2024 to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, the West Bank, Israel, Albania, Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Jamaica, Austria, South Korea and the Philippines.

Budget monitoring, too

Not all of the secretary’s work is glamorous or exciting.

Since the secretary of state oversees the State Department, this person must carefully monitor budgets to help ensure that the correct amount of money from the department’s large budget – currently at US$58.8 billion for July 2024 through June 2025 – reaches the various U.S. diplomatic and foreign aid missions.

The secretary also needs to understand and make sure the U.S. lives up to its obligations under different international agreements, such as arms control treaties and trade deals. The secretary is involved in negotiating agreements that come out of international organizations, such as the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Another crucial but less high-profile role for the secretary of state is protecting U.S. citizens abroad. The State Department helps U.S. citizens living or traveling abroad with issues ranging from renewing passports and visas to helping them evacuate due to a medical emergency.

The State Department also helps U.S. citizens who experience a natural disaster, political unrest or a kidnapping abroad.

Finally, the secretary must navigate and balance international expectations of how the U.S should respond to escalating conflicts in other countries. At the same time, the secretary has to balance domestic U.S. political considerations.

Why experience matters

The secretary of state takes the lead on responding to crises, from humanitarian disasters to foreign cyberattacks, which can escalate quickly. It is essential to have someone in this post who has crisis management experience, a clear understanding of global politics and history, and strong decision-making skills.

An adept secretary can build bipartisan support and effectively communicate the importance of foreign policy decisions to the public. Lack of political acumen can lead to gridlock or undermine initiatives the U.S. wants to undertake.

If a secretary of state is inexperienced or has poor judgment, it could also exacerbate crises or lead to long-term damage for the U.S.’s national security and its relationships with other countries.

This story is part of a series of profiles of Cabinet and high-level administration positions.

Monica Duffy Toft, Professor of International Politics and Director of the Center for Strategic Studies, The Fletcher School, Tufts University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Peter Kastor, Washington University in St. Louis

The new U.S. Senate is getting down to business, and one of its first tasks will be to consider Donald Trump’s nominations to federal office.

Trump himself has suggested his preference for recess appointments for Cabinet members. This would avoid the traditional confirmation hearings in the Senate, which are increasingly polarizing, drawn out and partisan.

Discussions of the nominations have included many references to the founders and the process they supposedly devised for confirming nominees.

Yet the founders, in fact, had very little to say on the subject. The Constitution states that the president “by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States.”

That’s it. The Federalist Papers, the editorials and pamphlets arguing in favor of ratification that so many students read in high school and college, didn’t add much else on the topic of federal appointments. And the founders did not explore the subject in detail in their own correspondence.

Crucial Senate function

I am a historian who has spent nearly two decades exploring the federal appointment process. I recently launched Creating a Federal Government, 1789-1829, a major digital project that reconstructs the federal government during its first decades.

The Senate considered more than 5,000 nominations to federal civil office from 1789-1829, and I’ve combed through the correspondence of the early federal administrations to understand their approach to this crucial Senate function.

The first presidents were adamant that the confirmation processes should be public and transparent, with Senate oversight. The early Senate was keen to preserve its power over appointments but afforded the president broad discretion in building the executive branch.

What this meant was that “advice and consent” was not decreed as a set of formal rules. Rather, advice and consent took form in practice and emerged from the day-to-day needs of government.

The founders’ model: Transparent inefficiency

George Washington, the first president of the United States, operated from the assumption that the president and the Senate should be actively involved in approving even the lowest-level officials.

After early nominations for the likes of Thomas Jefferson, the first secretary of state, and Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the Treasury, Washington personally nominated hundreds of customs collectors, low-ranking officers in the military and territorial officials. One of the first of these came on Aug. 3, 1789, when Washington dispatched the names of 139 nominees for “Collectors, Naval Officers and Surveyors for the Ports.”

There was barely a federal office that Washington did not think the Senate should consider. His only exceptions were clerks, postmasters and enlisted personnel in the military.

The Senate itself was smaller back then, ranging from 22 members from 11 states when Washington was inaugurated in 1789 to 48 members from 24 states when John Quincy Adams left office in 1829. There were no hearings, nor much in the way of formal vetting. Rather, the Senate discussed nominations among themselves, often voting the same day.

Recess appointments rare

This collaborative system was designed to exemplify checks and balances. But it was also an inefficient one that consumed the president’s and senators’ time and energy.

The process was especially busy at the start of a congressional term, and the Senate Executive Journal – the only detailed account of early Senate proceedings – shows barely a week went by without considering nominations.

Washington’s successors likewise dispatched thousands of names to the Senate on lists often written in their own hand. The Senate responded by devoting much of its daily agenda to considering these nominees.

And the results tell a story: Just as presidents believed that the Senate must be involved with building the federal workforce, senators apparently believed that presidents should have broad discretion. They confirmed over 90% of the nominations they received from 1789-1829, according to my analysis.

This remained the case even during the first period of divided government from 1801 to 1802. The Federalist majority in the Senate consistently approved President Jefferson’s nominations, even though he was from the opposing Republican Party.

Jefferson initially saw considerable partisan advantage to federal appointments. In 1801-1802, for example, he removed 146 customs officials he believed were Federalists and eagerly sought Republicans to take their place. But Jefferson also kept on numerous officials appointed by his Federalist predecessors because he valued their competence – and institutional stability.

From the 1790s through the 1820s, these early presidents rarely used recess appointments, my research shows. When they did, it was primarily to fill vacancies created by death or resignation, after which they quickly submitted formal nominations once the Senate returned.

The modern model: A divided system

The U.S. began shifting from this relatively constructive give-and-take among the founders in the late 1820s.

When Andrew Jackson came into office in 1829, he proclaimed that to the victor go the spoils, and that included appointments. He treated appointments as a reward for political allies, no matter their qualifications.

Jacksonian patronage became the target for progressive reformers in the late 19th century. They claimed that the spoils system produced a federal system that hired unqualified employees and rewarded political allies rather than serving the general public. They believed civil service reform would produce an effective, efficient and nonpartisan federal government.

Those reforms, combined with a growing federal government that contained too many offices for the Senate to consider, laid the groundwork for today’s structure in which Senate confirmation is reserved for higher-level offices, most of which change with each presidential administration.

Vast majority still approved

Reserving advice and consent to high-level positions has shifted the focus of the Senate and the attention of the public entirely to high-value offices and nominees with greater political experience.

Broadcasting confirmation hearings, a practice that began in the 1980s, has only increased the sense that they’ve become political theater. It has made the process more transparent but also created greater opportunities for all involved to convert hearings into political grandstanding.

Yet for all those recent developments, the vast majority of nominations are nevertheless approved. This is especially true for non-Cabinet and lower-level posts.

For positions such as U.S. attorney, assistant secretary of state or director of the Bureau of Land Management, presidents usually submit nominations to the Senate when the Senate is in session. The Senate in turn usually confirms with spirited discussion but limited opposition.

All presidents have made use of temporary appointments, and some nominations generate major public controversies, but they are the exceptions that prove the rule.

And the process of nominating people for those offices remains a remarkable link to the earliest years of the republic.

The rules, however, are changing.

The first Trump administration used temporary appointments far more often than his predecessors. And he may do the same in his second term.

Meanwhile, Republicans in the Senate faced criticism for dragging their feet on nominations to important civil and military offices during the Obama and Biden administrations.

These recent developments constituted breaks from long-standing practices and profound breaks from how the Founding Fathers imagined the process of advice and consent.

Peter Kastor, Professor of History & American Culture Studies, Associate Vice Dean of Research, Washington University in St. Louis

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Jay L. Zagorsky, Boston University and H. Sami Karaca, Boston University

Capitalism, communism and socialism are the world’s three major economic systems. While the phrase “economic system” may seem like a yawn, countless people have fought and died in major wars over which one should dominate.

Shifts from one system to another, like the 1989 fall of communism in much of Eastern Europe, changed the lives of millions. And while researchers know that a country’s economic system dramatically impacts people’s living standards, less is known about how attitudes toward these systems have changed over time.

We are professors working at Boston University’s new Ravi K. Mehrotra Institute, which is trying to understand how business, markets and society interact. Given many recent criticisms of capitalism, we were surprised to find positive sentiment toward capitalism is slowly rising over time.

The main economic systems explained

Capitalism, communism and socialism are economic and political systems that differ in their principles and organization. Capitalism emphasizes the private ownership of resources and the means of production, driven by profit and market competition, with minimal government intervention.

Communism, on the other hand, advocates for a classless society where all property is communally owned. In communism, wealth is distributed according to need and there is no private ownership, which aims to eliminate inequality and oppression.

Socialism falls between these extremes. It focuses on the collective or state ownership of key industries and resources. This allows for some private enterprise, with the aim of reducing inequality through social welfare programs and obtaining a more equitable distribution of wealth.

Modern economies blend capitalism with socialism to address challenges like inequality, market failures and negative externalities, like when a business harms the environment. Governments intervene through regulations, welfare programs and public services to tackle issues like pollution and income inequality. This creates what economists call a “mixed economy.”

The amount of state involvement varies from country to country. At one end is market capitalism, where markets dominate with a limited government role. The U.S. is one such example.

At the other end is state capitalism, like in China, where the government directs economic activity while incorporating market elements. The goal is to combine market efficiency and innovation with measures to contain capitalism’s social and economic costs.

How to measure people’s attitudes toward economic systems

Some surveys have asked people directly how they feel about these systems.

For example, the Pew Research organization’s most recent survey on the issue found the proportion of Americans with positive views of either capitalism or socialism has declined slightly since 2019, with capitalism remaining more popular overall. Nevertheless, Americans are split sharply along partisan lines. About three-quarters of Republican voters have positive views of capitalism, compared with less than half of Democratic voters.

Unfortunately, there are no long-running surveys tracking people’s feelings toward the three systems. Because of this shortcoming, we used artificial intelligence to analyze references to the three systems in more than 400,000 newspaper articles published over a span of decades.

We identified every news story that discussed capitalism, communism or socialism using ProQuest’s TDM Studio. ProQuest has digitized almost all the articles in major English-language newspapers – including The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times – starting in the mid-1970s, with partial archives from earlier years.

The AI model was designed to assess the tone of each article across several dimensions, including anger, surprise and happiness. After the model scored each article on those qualities, we combined the emotions into three categories: positive, negative, and neutral or unknown. For example, an article discussing capitalism might be rated as 60% positive, 20% negative and 20% neutral.

Using an AI large language model allowed us to track shifts in press attitudes over time – which, to be fair, might not match popular opinion.

How views have changed since the 1940s

When we looked at newspaper articles from the end of World War II to the present, we found something unexpected. In the 1940s, capitalism was not well regarded. The average article containing “capitalism” or “capitalist” got a 43% negative and 25% positive sentiment score. This is surprising, since we looked at newspapers published primarily in countries with capitalist systems.

However, just because capitalism didn’t get a high positive score doesn’t mean that newspaper writers loved communism or socialism. In the 1940s, articles with those words also got relatively high negative scores: 47% on average for articles containing “communism” or “communist,” and a 46% negative rating for “socialism” and “socialist.”

Since that time, however, positive sentiment toward capitalism has improved. In the 2020s, the average article with capitalism got a more balanced 37% negative and 34% positive sentiment score. While capitalism clearly isn’t loved in the press, it’s also not disparaged as much as it was just after World War II.

The news media’s attitudes toward capitalism improved more than attitudes toward socialism or communism over time. In the 1960s, positive attitudes toward all three were roughly the same. Today, however, positive sentiment toward capitalism is 4 or 5 percentage points higher than the other two. The climb wasn’t steady, since the number of favorable articles about capitalism fell during recession years.

Still, some contemporary commentators fret that capitalism is in crisis.

Not long ago, The New York Times – a newspaper located in the world’s financial center – ran an op-ed headlined “How Capitalism Went Off the Rails.” A recent book review in The Wall Street Journal, a newspaper that is a bastion of capitalism, starts, “Our universities teach that we are living the End of Times of ‘late capitalism.’”

But while capitalism clearly isn’t beloved by all, we didn’t find evidence that it’s being overtaken by socialism or communism. Instead, using AI to process the attitudes reflected in thousands of newspaper articles, we found that people – or at least the press – are slowly warming to it.

Jay L. Zagorsky, Associate Professor of Markets, Public Policy and Law, Boston University and H. Sami Karaca, Professor of Business Analytics, Boston University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.