The Free Press
Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) sees the Middle East on fire, and he considers it an opportunity. That was the bottom line of his kid-gloves Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday for his nomination to be secretary of state.
During the hearing, Jim Risch, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a Republican from Idaho, announced that a three-phase ceasefire deal had been reached between Israel and Hamas—and Rubio had a reply:
“We don’t know yet for sure, but there are opportunities available now in the Middle East that did not exist 90 days ago,” he said. “Whether it’s what’s happened in Lebanon, whether it’s what’s happened in Syria, whether it’s what hopefully will happen with this ceasefire.”
Those opportunities include the following:
The prospect of Saudi Arabia formally recognizing Israel—building on president-elect Donald Trump’s first-term pact known as the Abraham Accords, which saw Bahrain, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates sign peace agreements with the Jewish state in 2020, with Sudan also signing in 2021.
A way forward for limited relations with the new government in Syria, despite the jihadist history of the rebels who seized Damascus last month and toppled President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
The possibility of building upon the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas to create a new administration in Gaza.
Notice that none of Rubio’s opportunities involve deploying American military might to the Middle East. Instead, his ideas for strengthening American alliances in the region were all diplomatic.
Of all of Trump’s major cabinet picks, Rubio has the easiest path to confirmation. During the hearing, Senator Tammy Duckworth, a Democrat from Illinois who on Tuesday grilled Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, was downright chummy with her former colleague. She recalled a time when Rubio helped her change Senate rules so she could bring her newborn onto the floor when she voted. Rubio remembered saying to her, “What’s the big deal? This place is already full of babies.”
That kind of exchange bodes well for Rubio’s nomination. A floor vote on the nomination could be called as early as Monday, according to two Senate aides. But grudging respect from Democrats is usually a reputation killer inside Mar-a-Lago. Trump’s more hard-line MAGA nominees, such as Kash Patel, Pam Bondi, and Hegseth, demonstrate their loyalty to the president-elect by the enmity they inspire from the establishment. Rubio, meanwhile, looks like a bridge between MAGA and Washington.
Part of this is because Rubio was not always so loyal to Trump. When they ran against each other in the 2016 primaries, Trump called the Florida senator “Little Marco.” Rubio responded by making fun of the small size of Trump’s hands, which some believe corresponds to the size of a certain male appendage.
But since Trump won in 2016, Rubio has evolved—a progression that was on full display in his opening statement of the hearing, during which Rubio derided the delusion of post–Cold War triumphalism. “Here in America, and in many of the advanced economies across the world,” he said, “an almost religious commitment to free and unfettered trade at the expense of our national economy shrunk the middle class, left the working class in crisis, collapsed our industrial capacity, and has pushed critical supply chains into the hands of adversaries and rivals.”
This critique of free trade and neoliberalism is a mainstream talking point in Trump’s Republican Party. But when Rubio was rising through Florida politics and later in the U.S. Senate, he was a fierce proponent of unfettered access to foreign markets. “Expanding free trade will open new markets to American exports, which will create thousands of new middle-class jobs here at home,” he said in a response to former president Barack Obama’s 2014 State of the Union Address.
And this brings us back to the Rubio of today. The 53-year-old, whose parents emigrated from Cuba, remains a steadfast supporter of Israel and a strong foe of the Chinese, Venezuelan, and Iranian tyrannies. But he is not the hawk that he was in 2014 when he called on Obama to send forces back to Iraq to contain the threat of the Islamic State.
For example, Rubio sees an opportunity in Iran, but not necessarily for a transition to democracy. And while he did not commit to any diplomacy with Tehran, he didn’t rule it out either. “My view of it is that we should be open to any arrangement that allows us to have safety and stability in the region,” he said. At the same time, he stressed that any deal with Iran to lift sanctions against the regime would enable it to funnel money to its proxy forces, which Israel has largely decimated in the last year.
The U.S. must be “clear-eyed” regarding Iran, Rubio said.
Clear-eyed engagement with Iran is better than the wishcasting diplomacy pursued by Obama and President Biden. But it’s also a realization that for all the opportunities in the Middle East, there are some things American power cannot achieve.
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