Marco Rubio's Inevitable Reckoning
Culpability via negligence is still culpability.
Among Donald Trump’s cabinet, Marco Rubio stands out in a number of ways. He may have the lowest net worth of any of the cabinet secretaries. Even in an administration where some people double up roles, Rubio occupying both the secretary of state and national security adviser roles is extraordinary. And defying the expectations of many — myself included — Rubio has survived more than fourteen months in Trump’s cabinet with a minimum of abuse by Trump himself.
Indeed, at this point there is no denying that Rubio has thrived in the second Trump administration. He has gotten his way on U.S. policy towards Venezuela and Cuba. His weird Munich speech was nonetheless better received than that of JD Vance’s a year earlier. Sure, he is most definitely a liar, but despite or because of that, his star is on the rise within the president’s orbit. Trump has said that Rubio will “go down as the greatest secretary of state in history.”1
The Iran war — and Rubio’s relative silence about it — raises an interesting question, however. U.S. allies are confused about what the United States even wants out of this conflict. Congress is even more confused.2 The Trump White House keeps gyrating on its endgame, toggling between wanting a quick end and planning a massive escalation.
The abject lack of strategic and policy planning in Gulf War Three is manifestly obvious. Given that this is planning failure is within Rubio’s remit, why is he not the target of more ire?
As per usual, Politico’s Nahal Toosi asks that very question — and then serves up some possible answers in her latest column:
When I asked several lawmakers, U.S. officials and analysts why Rubio seems so protected from criticism over his role in the Iran war, I was told the following:
First, Trump is the easier, more important target. His jaw-dropping rhetoric aside, he’s the president, and the buck stops with him.
Another factor: The foreign policy establishment tends to think of Rubio as secretary of State more than as national security adviser. So while critics are quick to blame him for slow embassy closures, they often forget to hold him accountable for the whole national security apparatus.
Perhaps above all, even Democrats enraged by the state of affairs in Iran see Rubio as one of Trump’s more competent aides.
“He’s the least crazy,” one Democratic senator told me after I granted them anonymity, like others, to talk about a sensitive issue. “If he gets fired, Trump would replace him with someone a lot worse.”
As much as the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World would like to dismiss that answer out of hand, it’s not so simple. A lot of Trump’s first-term foreign policy advisors provided a variation of this justification for why they were working for Trump: if they didn’t things would be worse. This logic was often dismissed as an easy rationalization during Trump’s first term, but his second-term behavior does seem to validate the argument.
The thing is, for this argument to work, it has to follow that Rubio’s value above replacement Trumper is positive. And as Toosi observes in her column, Rubio’s only area of competency has been reducing the size of the foreign policy machinery:
In his role as national security adviser, Rubio has shrunk the National Security Council staff and limited their ability to convene government agencies for policy discussions, as I’ve chronicled before. Instead, the most sensitive conversations are held in the West Wing among Trump and a few aides who then tell agencies to implement his decisions, often without stress-testing the ideas.
That means many people who could have flagged or at least prepared for challenges related to Iran — such as the threat to the energy sector or the need to coordinate with U.S. allies — were left in the cold. And most such people have little incentive to act without orders from above, because after last year’s staff purges, everyone is afraid of being fired.
That includes people in the State Department’s Middle East bureau. One staffer there told me that until the war started, they had not been tasked with any actions related to it. “I had all sorts of people messaging me, like ‘Oh, you must be so busy,’ and I’m like, ‘Nope.’”….
Rubio despises Iran’s Islamist regime, but, from what I’ve gathered, he was not a major force pushing for a large-scale attack on Iran — not like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). That said, Rubio didn’t fight the idea, and he was open to the notion that the time to hit Iran was now because the regime was unusually weak. So one would expect him to have kicked planning and coordination into high gear.
It’s not obvious at all that Rubio has provided any value-added over any other lapdog who would have occupied his position in his stead. Like everyone else, he has functioned as a yes man for Trump. Indeed, he has failed in both of his foreign policy roles. As national security advisor, he has administered no real policymaking process. As Secretary of State, he has failed to persuade any one about the wisdom of U.S. military action. Instead, as I wrote earlier this week, “here’s the thing about the Trump administration: it’s not just that their policies do not make a ton of sense or that they failed to do any strategic planning. It’s that they don’t care that they haven’t put in the work.”
Marco Rubio is not the architect of the Iran clusterfuck. But he is most definitely the author of the conditions that make the clusterfuck possible. At some point, the reckoning for his negligence will come back to haunt him.
Though it is interesting that the Iranians have requested to have Vance as their interlocutor in peace talks.
At this rate, they might actually have a staffer read the U.S. Constitution and figure out something that they can do about it.
Rubio has always been an empty suit, someone others can project their hopes and dreams on, even though there’s no substance to the man. He sometimes gives off competence vibes, occasionally says sensible things, but nothing in his past or present gives any indication of a competent, thoughtful, or moral person living in that suit.
The fact is, the State Department was DOGEd last July and so many subject matter experts on issues like Iran and nuclear proliferation no longer work in government. That is on Rubio (and Musk and Trump).
Of course, would Trump have listened to them if they had been able to provide advice leading up to the war? - Probably not.
Would they have been able to contribute to the 'negotiations' between Witkoff/Kushner and the Iranians? - Probably not.
A lack of headcount, a loss of expertise, funneling talks through two people who have little experience in Iran. The whole thing was an accident waiting to happen.