Marco Rubio

Rubio's role in the Iran file has been rhetorical rather than instrumental: he speaks, nothing gets signed. On 21 May he called any Iranian Hormuz toll system 'completely illegal' and a dealbreaker, the first cabinet-level naming of the toll architecture as an absolute red line. He rejected Hormuz-first sequencing that same month and pressed China to take a more active role in Beijing on 14 May; none of it produced paper, and by early June the administration had gone nearly 100 days without signing a single Iran instrument even as Rubio called the deal '95 per cent complete'.

The same pattern surfaced on Ukraine. On 22 May Rubio confirmed US-led peace Mediation had 'stagnated', the most explicit admission any American official had made that the diplomatic track had run out of road. Three days later Russia's foreign minister phoned him to demand US diplomats leave Kyiv; Washington declined, and Istanbul's bilateral channel became the only active format Left.

Rubio's Cuba portfolio has moved from rhetoric to enforcement. He dismissed Havana's 176-measure reform as 'not dramatic enough' on 19 June, closing off the diplomatic opening the measures seemed designed to create, and the administration coupled that stance to an accelerating designation campaign: CUPET, Cuba's state oil company, was sanctioned on 11 June, and its Energy Minister two weeks earlier. Rubio told Congress the 1960 seizure of American assets justified the CUPET listing.

Florida's congressional delegation now routes demands through him directly. On 10 July, María Elvira Salazar and three colleagues wrote urging sanctions on Cuba's overseas medical-mission programme; the 13 July wave hit tourism and trade entities instead, leaving that specific request unanswered. Rubio's earlier Vatican channel, opened with Pope Leo XIV on 9 May, remains the only route where Washington and Havana share a trusted interlocutor.

On 18-19 March, after Iranian drones twice struck the Mina Al-Ahmadi refinery, Rubio issued an emergency waiver bypassing congressional review for $16.5 billion in arms: Kuwaiti radar and UAE counter-drone systems, split roughly evenly between the two. Representative Gregory Meeks called it 'lack of preparation'; the waiver capped a pattern in which Congress had already lost its War Powers vote, leaving oversight of wartime arms sales as threadbare as oversight of the war itself.

Rubio also disclosed to congressional leaders that the US had pre-emptively joined Israel's strikes on Iran, knowing they would trigger Iranian retaliation, rather than acting defensively; that disclosure became the war's central legal controversy. His public wish to see Tehran's 'governing system' end directly contradicted Defense Secretary Hegseth's insistence the war was not about Regime change.