U.S. President Donald Trump with Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the White House in June, 2025.Manuel Balce Ceneta/The Associated Press
Just after being sworn in as a first-term U.S. Senator, in 2023, JD Vance endorsed Donald Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. The move marked the completion of Mr. Vance’s stunning transformation from Never Trumper to MAGA enthusiast, and launched him on the path to becoming Vice-President.
In an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Vance justified his endorsement of Mr. Trump – whom he once suggested might be “America’s Hitler” – by noting that he had not started any new wars during his first term in the White House between 2017 and 2021.
“My entire adult lifetime has been shaped by presidents who threw America into unwise wars and failed to win them,” Mr. Vance wrote. “Donald Trump’s presidency marked the first real disruption to a failed consensus and the terrible consequences it wrought.”
Now, Mr. Trump’s critics, including a few prominent MAGA voices, are accusing him of falling into a similar trap as his predecessors by joining Israel in a military assault on Iran that appears to have no end in sight. And no member of Mr. Trump’s inner circle is likely more uncomfortable with this turn of events than Mr. Vance, seen by many as a future leader of Mr. Trump’s MAGA movement.
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It has not gone unnoticed in Washington that Mr. Vance has said little and tread cautiously since the Feb. 28 launch of the war in Iran. Mr. Trump has conceded that his Vice-President may have expressed reservations. “He was, I would say, philosophically a little bit different than me,” the President said last week. “I think he was maybe a little less enthusiastic about going, but he was quite enthusiastic.”
There is no ambiguity, however, about where Secretary of State Marco Rubio stands. He is widely considered to have been the leading voice within the administration advocating for an assault on Iran. He was long known as a Republican hawk during his U.S. Senate career, where he spent years calling for regime change in the Islamic Republic and had been especially critical of former president Barack Obama’s diplomatic overtures toward Tehran.
Once considered a neoconservative, Mr. Rubio has adapted his views to fit with Mr. Trump’s less ideologically driven foreign policy preferences. He no longer openly champions spreading democracy abroad, but favours replacing those atop foreign regimes hostile to the United States with more compliant leaders willing to work with Washington.
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That is the playbook Mr. Rubio has followed in Venezuela in the wake of the January U.S. military intervention that led to the arrest of Nicolás Maduro. Instead of backing Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, or calling for wholesale regime change in Venezuela, the Trump administration has been working with Mr. Maduro’s second-in-command, Delcy Rodríguez, to secure economic reforms and the release of some political prisoners.
Venezuela also appears to be a model for the changes Mr. Rubio aims to bring about in Cuba, where the Trump administration’s blockade on oil shipments from Venezuela has plunged the country into its deepest crisis since possibly the 1959 communist revolution.
So far, Mr. Trump appears to have placed his trust in Mr. Rubio’s foreign policy instincts, leaving many observers wondering whether the Secretary of State, rather than Mr. Vance, is now his preferred choice to become the Republican presidential nominee in 2028.
Still, the warm relationship between Mr. Rubio and Mr. Trump, who were bitter rivals for the 2016 Republican nomination, could turn sour again if Tehran succeeds in keeping the Strait of Hormuz closed to most shipping traffic for weeks. Mr. Rubio, along with Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, risks becoming a scapegoat if the war drags on and oil prices remain elevated. Despite massively degrading Iran’s military capacity, and eliminating its top leaders, the Islamic regime has proved far more resilient than expected.
Mr. Trump is suddenly discovering there is no easy way out of this war. If he ends the military campaign before achieving his goals of eliminating Iran’s ability to obtain nuclear weapons and expand its ballistic missile program, he risks a devastating verdict by American voters in the November midterm elections – and by history itself. He will have spent much blood and treasure without freeing the Iranian people or making America safer.
Mr. Rubio, who, along with South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, prodded Mr. Trump into launching the war, could also see his own presidential ambitions quashed for good.
A more positive outcome in Iran remains possible, enabling Mr. Trump to claim some version of victory. But unless that happens, expect Mr. Vance to maintain his distance as he keeps his sights firmly on 2028.