The meetings come against a backdrop of global and regional unease over US policies, notably on trade and large tariffs that President Trump has threatened to impose on friend and foe alike.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Malaysia Thursday at a meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. The meeting put the Russia-Ukraine war at the center of a trip that was meant to strengthen alliances in Southeast Asia.

“A Marco Rubio impostor is using AI voice to call high-level officials,” Axelrod wrote on X. “This is the new world in which we live, and we’d better figure out how to defend against it because of its implications for our democracy and the world,” he wrote on X.