WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Marco Rubio stood silent and stone-faced behind Donald Trump on Wednesday as the president joked of passing the buck if his deal with Iran, under increasingly withering criticism and scrutiny, ultimately falls apart.
The blame, Trump said, would likely fall on his vice president, JD Vance, who led the negotiations toward a memorandum of understanding with Iran and will sign the agreement this week in Switzerland — a ceremony that will generate indelible images for a politician openly considering a run for the White House.
The controversial diplomatic breakthrough poses a quandary for Vance, whose aides see Rubio as his most viable challenger for the Republican presidential nomination should the secretary choose to run.
“If it works out, I’m going to take the credit,” Trump said of the Iran deal, with Rubio by his side.
“If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming JD,” he joked. “You better be careful, JD!”
Silent secretary
Rubio, who also serves as the president’s national security advisor, has remained effectively mum since news of a preliminary peace deal was announced by the administration on Sunday.
His absence has drawn notice across foreign policy circles — not only because Rubio has served as chief architect of the administration’s global strategy thus far, but also because he has become one of the president’s most effective communicators, both at home and abroad.
By contrast, Vance, on a scheduled press tour promoting his new book, has emerged as the face of an agreement that appears to be fracturing a Republican Party already divided over America’s role in the world.
The administration’s internal divide over Iran extends beyond the war to broader U.S. support for its historic allies, including Israel in the Middle East, Canada and Mexico in this hemisphere, and Ukraine and Europe against a revanchist Russia.
“Rubio has always been a hawk on Iran, and Vance has always been an appeaser,” said Danielle Pletka, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, describing the vice president as positioning himself “as Trump without the flaws.”
“Rubio has a harder job because he’s more of a traditional Republican,” she said, adding that a competitive presidential run by the secretary might require him to pitch “a return to normalcy.”
No guarantee of success
Behind closed doors, Rubio advocated against the deal in its current form, citing intelligence reports that found it highly unlikely Tehran would give up its nuclear ambitions, according to two sources familiar with the matter. Rubio’s internal skepticism was first reported by Axios.
The deal kicks down the road highly technical discussions over the mechanics of unwinding Iran’s nuclear program — with no guarantee of success — while granting Tehran immediate relief, lifting a U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports that will allow Iranian imports and exports to resume.
In exchange, Iran has only agreed in principle not to pursue nuclear weapons — a vow it has made multiple times before — and to do its “best” to return commercial shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz back to prewar levels. It commits in the deal to refrain from implementing a toll system in the strait, according to U.S. officials, for a mere 60-day period.
“This agreement is a road map for Iran to become a rising, stronger power in the [Persian] Gulf — stronger than it is even today,” said Robert Pape, a political science professor at the University of Chicago.
“That is going to be an issue for the balance of power with Israel, which before the Iran war was the rising power. Now it’s lost that paradigm,” Pape said. “And this is going to be an issue with the future disposition of American forces in the region, because the [memorandum of understanding] states quite clearly that Iran is expecting those forces to withdraw.”
Positioning by the vice president
Despite mounting skepticism, Vance has embraced his role in ending a war that a powerful faction of Trump’s base aggressively opposed from the start.
“I think there are some people who just want the bombing to continue, regardless of whether it accomplishes anything for Americans,” Vance told CBS News on Wednesday.
“I do think there are people,” he added, “who sometimes confuse the ends with the means.”
Because the preliminary Iran deal leaves key details unresolved, further negotiations virtually ensure the agreement remains in flux through the election season — potentially thrusting the talks into the center of the presidential primary campaign.
“Given the distance between the parties on the core nuclear issues, as well as the Trump administration’s poor track record with coercive diplomacy, I fully expect the 60-day window for talks to be extended, as the [memorandum of understanding] text permits, taking this issue to the heart of the midterms and beyond,” said Reid Pauly, a professor of nuclear security and policy at Brown University.
“There will be a lot of incentive in the administration,” Pauly added, “to distance oneself from this fiasco.”
As a guest on Megyn Kelly’s podcast this week, Vance acknowledged the political realities of Trump’s base splintering over the Iran war, noting that a coalition of isolationists — as well as those advocating what he called a more “aggressive” foreign policy — had together swept Trump back into office.
The war may be breaking that coalition apart, he said.
“We have a constituency right now that is saying, we’re going to send boots on the ground — they want Donald Trump to send hundreds of thousands of ground troops into Iran,” Vance told the former Fox News host.
“Those are Republicans,” Kelly said.
“We need people to be pushing back from inside the tent,” Vance replied.
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Michael Wilner
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