Where’s Marco?

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, April 23, 2026

 

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 sidelined.

 

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.

 

The Iranians have an obvious reason to insist on a strict “no Rubio” policy in talks with the United States. Not only did America’s chief diplomat spend 14 years in the Senate as an outspoken hawk, he was particularly hawkish when staking out positions on Iran. He opposed the nuclear deal between the regime and Barack Obama, called for sanctions on the country’s ballistic missile program, warned in dire terms of the potential nuclear threat Iran posed, and met with Reza Pahlavi, the son of the shah deposed by the Khomeinist revolution.

 

If you were a Shiite fanatic eager to make the White House buckle in negotiations, wouldn’t you rather bargain with Steve Witkoff than with someone like that?

 

For similar reasons, the president himself might prefer to have someone other than Rubio at the table. He’s grown bored with the war, New York Times reporter and Trump biographer Maggie Haberman told CNN on Wednesday: “My sense is the president would like to just be done with this, and he has other things he’d like to focus on.” If that’s true, and if it’s likewise true that the Iranians would be more receptive to an offer that isn’t coming from one of their least favorite figures in the administration, Trump has a political incentive to keep Rubio far away from negotiations.

 

Maybe a personal incentive, too. Should the Vance-Kushner-Witkoff team strike a bargain on terms favorable to the United States, Trump can and will take all of the credit by pointing to his pressure tactics against the regime. If not for my mad threats to end Iranian civilization, he’ll say, the enemy never would have caved. And that will seem plausible: Lord knows, no one expects them to be intimidated by Jared Kushner’s steely mettle.

 

But if Rubio is the lead negotiator, the president will inevitably share credit for the result. “The adult in the room” rescued the White House from its own incompetence, the media will claim. The secretary of state’s longstanding hostility to the regime cowed the Iranians into tempering their demands.

 

If you don’t think Donald Trump would saddle himself with a lamer-than-necessary diplomatic team in the name of maximizing his own share of the glory from their endeavors, you’ve been watching a different movie than I have since 2015.

 

Having said all that, though, no one inside or outside the White House has a stronger incentive to keep Rubio on the sidelines in resolving the Iran war than J.D. Vance does.

 

It’s true that the vice president is taking a huge political risk by further involving himself in an unpopular conflict that might do him serious political damage in 2028, but what choice does he realistically have? He’ll be saddled with Trump’s baggage in the next presidential primary no matter what he does. So why not seize an opportunity to position himself emphatically on the side of peace?

 

I can’t say whether Vance has the juice with Trump to “pull rank” on Rubio and call dibs on leading peace talks, but I can surely imagine him begging the president for the chance. If he can make a deal that ends hostilities and reopens the Strait of Hormuz, he’ll rebuild some of his lost anti-war credibility with swing voters and the “America First” right, giving himself a compelling rebuttal in the next cycle when some opponent lays Trump’s war at his feet. “I’m the guy who ended that war, remember?” he’ll say. Americans will remember.

 

Conceivably, Rubio was all set to take the reins on Iran diplomacy with Trump’s blessing only to have J.D. Vance petition the boss to hand those reins to him instead. And the president would have reason to do so, as Vance’s longtime dovishness would make him more agreeable to the Iranians as a negotiating partner than the secretary of state. That can only help Trump achieve his supreme strategic goal of, uh, “just being done with this.”

 

But if you tend toward believing that Marco Rubio’s recent disappearing act is more voluntary than involuntary, there’s a good argument for that too.

 

Scenario two: Rubio has sidelined himself.

 

Despite his hawkish past, evidence suggests that the secretary of state wasn’t enthused about this war.

 

Even in the conflict’s planning stages, it appears, he kept a low profile. Rubio is no more than a minor character in two lengthy play-by-plays that the New York Times published about White House deliberations, and while he “did not try to talk Mr. Trump out of the operation,” he was reportedly “ambivalent” about moving forward.

 

He “did not believe the Iranians would agree to a negotiated deal,” the Times alleged, and so “his preference was to continue a campaign of maximum pressure rather than start a full-scale war.” He advised Trump that “If our goal is regime change or an uprising, we shouldn’t do it. But if the goal is to destroy Iran’s missile program, that’s a goal we can achieve.” At one point Rubio supposedly went as far as to dub Benjamin Netanyahu’s happy talk about deposing the mullahs “bullsh-t.”

 

All of which seems remarkably prescient in hindsight. (Well, not quite “all.” The U.S. reportedly hasn’t come close to fully destroying Iran’s missile arsenal.) Go figure that the most competent member of the president’s Cabinet might have listened to the Pentagon’s warnings about the Strait of Hormuz, envisioned oil-market convulsions and inflationary chaos, and resolved to distance himself from the sh-tshow to come as thoroughly as his official duties would permit.

 

In this scenario, Rubio knew a looming disaster when he saw one and, like any capable politician, he set about doing everything possible to keep his fingerprints off of it.

 

And he is an extraordinarily capable politician. Last year I argued that, aside from J.D. Vance, no one had navigated the Trump era in Republican politics more skillfully than he had: “He’s the only conservative left from the Before Trump era to have made himself valuable to the president and the Jacobin movement that now leads the American right. Everyone else who’s tried has stumbled at some point in trying to reconcile Reaganism with Maoism, yet Marco has somehow pulled it off.”

 

A year on, one can plausibly counter that Rubio has now outperformed Vance himself. The VP is caught in political no-man’s land, unable to prevent or resolve a war that his chud base despises and humiliated by his failure to rescue postliberal icon Viktor Orbán in Hungary. Meanwhile the secretary of state keeps chugging along, somehow Trumpy enough to keep impressing the president’s MAGA base and un-Trumpy enough to reassure everyone else.

 

I would have bet good money before the war that the grassroots right would scapegoat him for it if it went sideways. He’s Hispanic, famously pushed comprehensive immigration reform while in the Senate, and espoused dogmatic Reaganite beliefs right up until the moment Trumpism became the only path for advancing in the GOP. The populist script writes itself: Rubio is a uniparty neocon infiltrator. He talked Trump into this catastrophe.

 

But I would have lost that bet. Blame for the war on the right has been assigned to actors ranging from Israel to, er, Satan, but not once have I encountered an accusation that the secretary of state is the hidden hand behind Trump’s folly. Come to think of it, apart from the newsletter you’re reading right now, I don’t recall so much as a sustained inquiry about why Marco Rubio hasn’t played a bigger role during the most perilous chapter of the president’s two terms. That’s how deft he’s been about avoiding the crisis while not making his avoidance conspicuous.

 

As for what he’s been doing with his time while the rest of the White House flails on Iran (apart from watching UFC, I mean), my guess is that he’s being pretty deft about that too.

 

To all appearances, he’s focused on Cuba.

 

Loosening the Castro regime’s grip on the island is an obvious passion project for the Floridian son of Cuban émigrés and so his role in that process has been emphatically hands-on. He’s in direct contact with Raúl Castro’s grandson/caretaker, has dispatched envoys to the island for talks, is courting potential strategic allies in the Caribbean, and wielded enough influence over the operation to yank Venezuela out of Cuba’s orbit that some joked about him being the new “viceroy” of that country.

 

At a Senate hearing in January, he half-boasted about his plans to phone Venezuelan leader Delcy Rodríguez three times a week to make sure she acted in accordance with America’s wishes, which naturally began with cutting off the cheap Venezuelan oil that had been propping up the Castro economy for years. Rubio stands a real chance of parlaying the subjugation of Nicolás Maduro’s regime in Caracas into successful gunboat diplomacy in Cuba, ending communism on the island at last.

 

And if he does, it’ll be a political master stroke in four or five different ways. It will give him an airtight alibi with Trump and Americans writ large for sidelining himself on Iran. (“I was ending Castroism!”) It will create a favorable contrast between him and Vance, whose diplomatic efforts with the Iranians are likely to be far less successful. It will thrill the right by engineering an outcome that White Houses of both parties have sought since 1959 and further endear him to Trump, who reeeeeeeally wants an easy win after the Iran mess to reestablish perceptions of his strength.

 

And it will enhance the legend of Marco Rubio as the last competent Republican, the lone survivor in the Trumpist extinction event that depopulated the American right of capable conservatives and left only dopes, kooks, bigots, grifters, and postliberal chuds in its wake.

 

Call him an oleaginous little sycophant, by all means. Call him “missing in action” in Iran, too. But whatever you do, don’t call him stupid.