After airing Antony Blinken‘s final interview as Secretary of State on The New Yorker Radio Hour on Friday, host David Remnick had New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos on the show to discuss President-elect Donald Trump‘s cabinet picks — including Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth and “anti-China hawk” Senator Marco Rubio, the nominee for Secretary of State. (Osnos, who reported for years from China, is now based in Washington, DC.)
In recapping the “exit interview” with Blinken, Remnick asserted that Biden’s Secretary of State “went to pains” to paint a picture of Rubio as “a kind of normal, serious foreign policy thinker.”
Osnos, who wrote the 2015 profile of Rubio ‘The Opportunist‘ in the New Yorker, said that what Trump gets out of Rubio in his cabinet is essentially basic competence and a CV that makes him a broadly unobjectionable choice — especially confirmable by his Senate colleagues, among who Rubio enjoys a mainly good reputation.
Osnos contrasted Rubio with Hegseth, “who in his confirmation hearings the other day was asked to name countries in ASEAN and could not, you know, that was his Sarah Palin moment where it was, you know, has he, you know, ‘I love all the countries in ASEAN,’ right?” [sic]
Should the U.S. Defense Secretary know what ASEAN is? Pete Hegseth doesn’t appear to https://t.co/dE8xprmwmL pic.twitter.com/X98REVnuMW
— TIME (@TIME) January 15, 2025
Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) asked Hegseth to name some of the country members of ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) and he replied, “We have allies in South Korea, and Japan, and Australia.” The Senator replied sternly that the countries Hegseth named are not members of ASEAN.
[NOTE: ASEAN is an inter-governmental international organization, comprising Indonesia, Vietnam, Laos, Brunei, Thailand, Myanmar, the Philippines, Cambodia, Singapore and Malaysia.]
Duckworth told Hegseth: “You are not technically proficient. You are not tactically proficient. And your nomination is an insult to those brave enough to be serving our nation.”
Osnos’s reference is to the moment in American political life when Sarah Palin was running on the GOP 2008 ticket with the late John McCain — and the Alaskan governor was widely criticized for the perception that she lacked national security knowledge and experience commensurate with the position she was seeking as Vice President.
Referencing Alaska’s proximity to Russia, Palin said during an ABC interview: “They’re our next-door neighbors, and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska.”
Palin’s You-Can-See-Russia-From-Here statement was widely mocked and became the keynote in comedian Tina Fey’s excoriating Palin impersonations on Saturday Night Live. It was a meme — in pre-meme times — symbolizing Palin’s purported lack of international bona fides.
Despite Osnos’s characterization of Hegseth’s answer, it’s different now: there is no sign that Hegseth’s flub is poised to have the kind of impact on his viability as Palin’s did on hers. And where McCain’s judgement in choosing her was called into question, Trump is not being similarly doubted by his base.