The Iran war is the most serious foreign policy crisis that Donald Trump will ever have to manage, God willing. So why hasn’t his most serious deputy—who, as it happens, is in charge of foreign policy—taken a lead role in solving it?
“Secretary of State Marco Rubio is an oleaginous little sycophant, and he probably is the best of the lot,” Kevin Williamson wrote recently of the president’s Cabinet. Both parts of that statement are true; whether or not most Americans agree with the first, I suspect most would agree with the second.
How could they not? In an administration full of unfit clowns and cartoonishly sinister villains, Rubio is the only figure in a top job who inspires a degree of confidence. He speaks intelligently about policy, eschews cringe tough-guy social-media posturing, and remains unfailingly self-possessed as his boss resorts to ever more embarrassing histrionics. There’s a reason the phrase “adult in the room” is often used to describe him, increasingly even in Republican focus groups.
It sure would be nice to have an adult in charge of the Iran mess right now. Especially with the man at the top sounding somehow more incoherent than usual.
So where the hell is he?
Rubio pops up periodically in television interviews to deliver talking points on the war, but he’s made only two bits of real news on Iran since the conflict began on February 28. The first came 48 hours after the bombs started falling, when he implied that Israel had maneuvered America into the war by resolving to attack regardless of whether the White House approved.
The second came when U.S. and Iranian officials met to talk peace in Pakistan earlier this month. The news in that case was that Rubio … didn’t attend the talks. He had more important business to take care of, like sitting ringside with the president at a UFC event in Miami.
His low profile in Iran diplomacy would normally lead me to speculate that he’s in the doghouse with Trump, “sidelined” due to some petty new grudge that our grudge-loving leader is nursing. But the UFC photo op makes that hard to believe, as does the fact that the president reportedly continues to tout Rubio among confidants as a potential 2028 nominee.
Considering how opaque the White House is about why underqualified deputies are assigned momentous tasks, it’s also tempting to chalk up Rubio’s absence to the vagaries of Trump’s personnel preferences. After all, this isn’t the first time the president has bypassed his top diplomat and farmed out high-stakes foreign outreach to less capable people. From Russia to Iran to the Gulf states, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner have been his go-to envoys more so than Rubio has.
But that’s not very persuasive in this case either. Rubio isn’t just secretary of state, he’s the national security adviser. How does a guy who holds like 15 different jobs in this administration end up a minor player behind Witkoff, Kushner, and J.D. Vance in resolving a war that threatens U.S. national security, not to mention the global economy and the remainder of Trump’s presidency?
It’s baffling. Let’s see if we can spitball a theory to explain it.
Scenario One: Rubio Has Been Pushed to the Periphery
The fact that the president is on good terms with Rubio doesn’t mean that the latter hasn’t been frozen out of the Iran process. It’s possible that the secretary of state craves a bigger role in settling the war but that forces have conspired to thwart him.
Forces on both sides of the conflict, I should add.
