Now Rubio Wears the War

If you’re a fan of covert White House infighting bursting, if only partly, into public view, then Thursday must have been a fun day for you.

“We don’t need an Iran deal,” President Donald Trump declared, apparently giving up on diplomacy with Tehran.

This latest turn of the Trumpian diplomacy–war wheel was widely interpreted as bad news for opponents of the Iran War and for supporters of Vice President J.D. Vance, who has led peace negotiations.

It’s neither.

“We don’t need a deal” is an obvious and significant improvement over Trump’s previous position: “We’ll either make a deal or we’ll make a war.” That latter framing is how the U.S. got into the current Iran catastrophe in the first place. Trump has proven himself deal-incapable when it comes to the Islamic Republic, so the “deal or war” dichotomy was always, in addition to being false, counterproductive to peace, as I explained to Responsible Statecraft in June. And anyway, Trump has also proven himself willing—if not eager—to attack Iran amid negotiations.

As for the political repercussions for Vance, well, this will require some explaining.

Without question, the president was slapping down the Veep, removing him from the Iran file and siding with that faction of the White House, led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, which opposes constructive diplomacy with Tehran. Trump’s announcement came in the form of a Truth Social post in which the president instructed Vance to focus instead on corruption and crime in Democratic-run cities.

In that sense, Trump’s unexpected pronouncement represents a political victory for Rubio, who has promoted the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports as a middle position between war and diplomacy. For now, the Rubio strategy prevails. But it won’t work. Rubio’s victory is a Pyrrhic one that will lead to his undoing as a viable presidential candidate.

Thanks, perhaps, to Rubio’s maneuvering, Trump has come to see the blockade as the easy “status quo” option, but as I explained in my other column this week (and on a recent episode of a popular online news show), that’s not right. The blockade builds pressure on Iran over time, and Middle East experts told me the Islamic Republic won’t stand idly by while the U.S. destroys its economy. In other words, Tehran is more likely to lash out than back down or collapse.

Moreover, the blockade is expensive to maintain and raises risks of an escalation spiral around the Strait of Hormuz. And even if the blockade somehow did effectuate state collapse in Iran, well, do you think the collapse of an enormous state in the Gulf region would be a good thing? To you and me, that would plainly be a very bad thing, but they’re not thinking very clearly over at the White House these days.

Rubio has made himself the most prominent and vocal supporter of this doomed strategy. And that means Rubio has made himself the face of the Iran War.

And that is a major development.

In case you haven’t noticed, our top diplomat hasn’t been doing a whole lotta diplomacy when it comes to the Iran War (or the Russia–Ukraine one, for that matter), and by that disgraceful means he’s managed to distance himself from the administration’s most unpopular policy.

No longer. The distance Rubio had cultivated has now collapsed.

Quite the opposite for Vance, the only cabinet member who has taken up the gargantuan task of securing a peace deal with Iran. Given Trump’s refusal to make the kind of concessions Tehran demands as part of a settlement, Vance’s good intentions weren’t translating into a lasting diplomatic—or political—win. Instead, Vance came to represent diplomatic failure, and in voters’ minds, however unfairly, he became closely associated with the war, since he was often on the teevee talking about it.

The whole situation was proving a political disaster for Vance—a Marine veteran who made his name lambasting forever wars in the Middle East—which helps explain his effort to subtly convey opposition to his boss’s misbegotten war. That effort culminated in a not-very-subtle social media post in which the Veep blamed the conflict for the GOP’s midterm-elections rout last week and made clearer than ever his preference for ending it ASAP. “The reason we lost is the war,” Vance said, rather bluntly.

Now, I’m more concerned with ending a war that is bad for America than I am with the political prospects of Vance or the Republican Party, but ask yourself, my Vance-adoring readers, and try to process these latest developments with as much cynicism as you can muster: Is it not better for Vance to become the guy who condemned and tried to stop the Iran War but was thwarted by Rubio? And is it not better for Vance that Rubio becomes the face of the Iran debacle, while the Veep turns his attention to crime and corruption?

It is better—much better, I humbly submit, even if few political analysts seem to agree with me.

As for the war itself and the prospects for peace, I harbor zero optimism. Maintain for another moment that cynicism that you mustered and confront this hard truth: There are no sources of hope in this Mideast fiasco, no obvious ways out, as Trump has laid for himself a hellish trap he cannot escape. Buckle up.