Marco Rubio is 54. A former senator who served 14 years in the Senate, he is the secretary of state and national security adviser in Donald Trump's administration—the first person since Henry Kissinger to hold both roles simultaneously. He also runs USAID. The Senate confirmed him by a 99-0 vote. He was not born in Cuba but is the son of Cuban immigrants—his father worked as a bartender, his mother as a cashier. His passion to see his parents' homeland freed from Communist-Party rule has inspired much of his political career. A fluent Spanish-speaker, he is a Catholic who has moved between denominations: Catholic-turned-Mormon-turned-Catholic-turned-Baptist-turned-Catholic. He is considered a rival to J.D. Vance to succeed Trump in 2028; some think he may leave his post before the end of the term, perhaps after the mid-term elections in November 2026, to prepare a presidential run. Betting markets have been closing the gap: at the start of 2026 Polymarket put Vance 44 percentage points ahead; by late March the gap was only ten points. An Economist/YouGov poll found that Vance still enjoys higher net favourability ratings among Republicans, by 68 points to 47.
When Rubio first ran for the Senate in 2010 he started 30 points behind his opponent, a sitting governor, but won easily. At 38 he was already speaker of the Florida House of Representatives. During the 2016 Republican presidential primaries he called Trump "a con artist"; Trump mocked him as "Little Marco".
He has consistently supported a "maximum pressure" strategy towards Venezuela. He hopes gunboat diplomacy will bring about Nicolás Maduro's downfall, weakening other left-wing regimes, including those of Nicaragua and Cuba. His State Department confirmed in May 2025 that all oil licences "which benefited the regime of Nicolás Maduro" would expire, and warned all Americans in Venezuela to leave the country immediately.
On April 25th 2025 Rubio hosted the foreign ministers of Congo and Rwanda, who signed a "declaration of principles" that America hopes will lead to a formal peace deal over the conflict in eastern Congo. He has also urged Congress to repeal sanctions on Syria, warning that waivers alone "are not going to be enough to attract foreign investment".
In March 2025 Rubio pledged continued American support for Tibetans and the Dalai Lama's succession process.
Rubio testified to Congress that the number of people who had died as a result of DOGE's cuts to foreign aid was zero—a claim at odds with academic estimates of up to 300,000 deaths.
As a senator in 2023, Rubio co-sponsored a law to block a unilateral withdrawal from NATO without a two-thirds vote in the Senate. By March 2026 he appeared to have recanted, calling NATO "a one-way street" and saying that after the Iran conflict America would "re-examine that relationship." His shift helped create a funereal mood in Europe; Ivo Daalder, a former American ambassador to NATO, argued that Europeans' refusal to facilitate the Iran war undermined pro-NATO Americans who said Europe offers America a launch-pad to project power globally.
After the raid that captured Nicolás Maduro on January 3rd 2026, Rubio said America was maintaining an oil embargo on Venezuela to force the post-Maduro regime to submit to its will. He described Delcy Rodríguez, the new acting president, as having a "very strong" relationship with him.
Rubio's interest in toppling communist dictatorships in the western hemisphere and seeding democracy there is deep and personal, rooted in his Cuban heritage. His hawkish evangelism calls to mind the neoconservatives he resembled during his years in the Senate. He is one of the architects of the "Donroe doctrine", which prescribes American dominance of the western hemisphere.
After the American-Israeli attack on Iran on February 28th 2026, Rubio said Israel in effect set the timing of the initial strike, telling reporters that America acted after learning Israel planned to strike first—a move he said threatened to put American bases in harm's way. Trump denied that sequence of events, insisting he had forced Israel's hand. Rubio said the objectives were to destroy Iran's ballistic-missile programme and its navy. He keeps repeating this narrow set of goals. He demanded Iran's "unconditional surrender" and said that Iran's roughly 400kg of highly enriched uranium would need to be physically retrieved: "People are going to have to go and get it."
On February 25th 2026 Rubio met Cuban regime officials in St Kitts & Nevis. "Cuba needs to change…and it doesn't have to change all at once," he said. The Cubans sent to negotiate included Fidel Castro's nephew and great-nephew. A deal modelled on the Venezuelan arrangement appeared to be taking shape: American investment in energy, release of political prisoners and return of exiles as business owners.
As secretary of state, Rubio is studiously deferential to Trump. Trump says Rubio will "go down as the greatest secretary of state in history". One person close to Trump calls him "a safe pair of hands". On long trips, to avoid being woken at all hours by his boss, Rubio says he sometimes shrouds himself in a blanket and pretends to be a sleeping staffer. Trump often asks donors and supporters who should be the 2028 Republican nominee: Rubio or Vance. Trump has described Vance as "a brilliant guy" who "gets a little bit tough on occasion" and needs restraining; in contrast, "Marco does it with a velvet glove. But it's a kill, right? The result is the same."
However, Rubio is less powerful than many of his predecessors. The institutions he runs have been much reduced by Trump's cost-cutting and purges of diplomats deemed insufficiently MAGA. Some of the most sensitive negotiations—with Israel, Arab states, Iran, Russia and Ukraine—have been entrusted mostly to Trump's golf buddy Steve Witkoff and his son-in-law Jared Kushner.
In February 2026 Rubio addressed the Munich Security Conference, earning a standing ovation for nodding to the historic bonds between America and Europe. He recalled his Spanish and Italian ancestry and thanked Europeans for sending troops to fight alongside America in many wars. In a separate speech, he praised the missionaries and soldiers who set sail from Europe to build global empires, and lamented that the decline and fall of those "great Western empires" was accelerated by "godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings". He rebuked Europe's former imperial powers for admitting too many immigrants and for being "shackled by guilt and shame" about the past. His speech was well-marinated in MAGA values: he urged Europe to protect its Christian heritage, avoid "civilisational erasure" by curbing mass migration, and dismissed those concerned about climate change as beholden to a "cult". After leaving Munich he travelled to Slovakia and Hungary, both run by Trump-admiring, Putin-friendly conservative nationalists. In Hungary he endorsed Viktor Orban, who faces a tough re-election fight, saying his success was "essential" to America's national interests.
His first trip abroad as secretary of state was to Central America and the Caribbean, to help stanch the flow of migrants and set the stage for confrontation with Venezuela. Before that, he had to see off another courtier, Richard Grenell, who sought accommodation with Venezuela. Rubio favoured coercion and regime change. Trump chose the second option.
A fluent Spanish-speaker, he cuts a vice-regal figure in Latin America. He has methodically blocked Cuba's sources of foreign currency; the island's electricity grid collapsed three times in March 2026. Congresswoman María Elvira Salazar of south Florida, another child of Cuban exiles, has called for "Nuremberg trials" for the regime, along with a rapid transition to democracy. Rubio has said the island needs not just new policies but new leaders.
Rubio has fused his neoconservative instincts with Trump's America First nativism into what amounts to an "Americas First" doctrine. He argues that many of America's troubles, from migration to drug-smuggling, originate in the Americas. As domestic policy extends into foreign policy, he emphasises restoring America's influence in its hemisphere. He calls drug gangs the "al-Qaeda of the western hemisphere" and has pushed a hard line on Venezuela, overriding Ric Grenell, Trump's special envoy for special missions, who favours diplomacy.
On July 17th 2025 Rubio dispatched a memorandum to America's diplomats stepping back from a decades-old priority of promoting democracy abroad. He instructed diplomats to congratulate the winning candidate in any country's election and refrain from "opining" on the fairness of the process or the democratic values of the country in question. The change, he wrote, was in keeping with "the administration's emphasis on national sovereignty". He carved out an exception where "there is a clear and compelling US foreign-policy interest."
On July 30th 2025 Rubio placed sanctions on Alexandre de Moraes, a Brazilian Supreme Court justice leading the prosecution of Jair Bolsonaro, under the Global Magnitsky Act—an action usually reserved for dictators and warlords. He posted that it should "be a warning to those who would trample on the fundamental rights of their countrymen." The State Department had revoked the visas of most Brazilian Supreme Court judges and other officials connected to Mr Bolsonaro's prosecution on July 18th 2025. He also visited the Panama Canal in February 2025, after which the Panama Canal Authority approved a $1.6bn dam project.
Beliefs are what divide people. Doubt unites them. -- Peter Ustinov