Questions are being raised about Secretary of State Marco Rubio being sent to the sidelines while President Donald Trump's Iran war drags the administration down.
According to a column from MSNBC's Julia Jester, as the nation's supposedly top diplomat, Rubio would normally be the face of efforts to bring the quagmire that Iran has become to a close.
As the Iran war persists, the Israel-Hamas has "hit a sizable snag" and the Ukraine-Russia war continues, Rubio has appeared to step back from his role in addressing the most pressing international crises facing the United States.
Instead, Rubio has focused his diplomatic efforts on the Western Hemisphere, leading negotiations on Venezuela and Cuba. His work on Cuba is personally significant, given his background as the son of Cuban immigrants.
According to the report, "Over the past year, Rubio has waged a maximum pressure campaign on the communist island, crippling its economy with sanctions and publishing a 100-page department report outlining espionage and influence efforts that threaten U.S. national security."
Rubio has publicly attached his name to most Cuba-related State Department actions and stood alongside Trump at a press conference following a military operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, but was notably absent from major public appearances after the joint U.S.-Israel operation against Iran.
According to his public schedule, Rubio "attends meetings and briefings at the White House, where he has Trump’s ear. But he’s not always deployed to conduct diplomacy in person on behalf of the U.S. in its most critical quagmires."
Former State Department negotiator Aaron David Miller expressed concern about Rubio's apparent absence from the administration's most significant foreign policy challenges.
"I worked for half a dozen secretaries of state," Miller said. "None of them would ever have agreed, in the face of the gravest and greatest crisis of the Trump administration's foreign policy presidency, to basically be sitting this one out or perceived to be M.I.A."
Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, called the decision to have special envoys report directly to Trump rather than through the secretary of state "extraordinary," telling MS NOW, "I think it’s a testament to how dysfunctional this is that the president saw fit to deploy his best friend and his son-in-law to navigate and negotiate three of the most difficult conflicts in the international system, and the results I think are pretty predictable.”