ABU DHABI — Secretary of State Marco Rubio will head to the Middle East this week for meetings with Arab Gulf allies, a high-stakes diplomatic assignment for a prominent Iran hawk who largely kept a low profile as the Trump administration pursued its fragile ceasefire deal with Tehran.
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Rubio will travel to the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Bahrain from Tuesday to Thursday. All three countries faced heavy targeting from Iranian strikes after U.S. and Israeli forces began the Iran war in late February, and they suffered some of the most acute economic fallout from Tehran’s move to block traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital shipping lane for export-dependent countries in the region.
In addition to his bilateral meetings during the three stops, Rubio will meet in Bahrain with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), a regional body for the Arab Gulf nations.
The secretary’s trip follows Vice President JD Vance’s meeting with Iranian officials in Switzerland on Sunday, beginning a 60-day effort to build upon the ceasefire announced in a controversial memorandum of understanding signed by President Donald Trump last week. The meeting was delayed by several days after Israeli attacks on Lebanon prompted Iran to say it would reimpose its closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
The outcome of U.S. talks with Iran would have significant impact across the Middle East. As part of the Trump administration’s proposed compromise with Tehran, the Iranian regime would give up its highly enriched uranium, which could be used to make a nuclear weapon, in exchange for a number of economic benefits, including the lifting of sanctions, access to frozen assets and a $300 billion fund for reconstruction.
That Vance, and not Rubio, has been the face of the deal has been widely noted in Washington.
“I think Marco just sees a bad deal when he knows one,” said Sen. Chris Coons, (D-Delaware), speaking at a roundtable with journalists hosted by Bloomberg News last week. Coons asserted that Rubio, his former colleague on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was not discussing the subject publicly to avoid being associated with a deal that the senator called a “near-total capitulation” to Tehran.
The State Department dismissed this sentiment as ill-informed speculation. “Secretary Rubio and the entire administration is 100 percent in lockstep behind President Trump,” said Tommy Pigott, a spokesperson.
Any public defense of the negotiations with Iran from Rubio could carry weight, as he was a fierce critic of the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, that was secured by the Obama administration. In one speech before that agreement was struck, Rubio said that “a bad deal [with Iran] almost guarantees war, because Israel is not going to abide by any deal that they believe puts them and their existence in danger.”
“I think many will be waiting with bated breath to see how one of the most internationalist and hawkish members of this administration will be making sense of this document,” said Behnam Ben Taleblu, an expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a D.C. think tank that has argued for more aggressive action against Tehran.
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Brett Bruen, who served on the White House National Security Council during the Obama administration, said Vance’s position as the public face of the deal was notable and may be because “the vice president so badly wanted to push peace, having been so ideologically at odds with the war.”
“But it’s also because Rubio knows a dumb diplomatic deal from a distance and this one with Iran has ‘disastrous’ emblazoned all over,” Bruen added.
Officials close to both Rubio and Vance have downplayed the significance of Vance’s role as the public face of the agreement, arguing that much of it was timing. The vice president, these people noted, had a book coming out and was already doing a press tour, whereas Rubio was traveling with Trump to the Group of Seven meetings in France, where naturally his boss took center stage.
“From what I can tell, he’s supportive of the deal,” said one person familiar with Rubio’s thinking, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media. This person added that the secretary, who also serves as White House national security adviser, was also “clear-eyed about the fact that we are talking about the Iranians here.”
Vance’s ownership of the issue has political implications, given that he and Rubio are widely expected to become political rivals in the race to succeed Trump as president.
Jon Hoffman, a policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute think tank, said Rubio and Vance represented “the divide between the traditional neoconservative worldview and the growing constituency weary of foreign entanglements,” particularly in the Middle East.
All three nations that Rubio is visiting were impacted by Iranian military retaliation after it was attacked. Bahrain, the smallest country in the region, saw major damage near the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet based in Manama, while the UAE was reported to have seen more attempted strikes than the five other Gulf Cooperation Council nations combined.
Experts said that while all three appeared to welcome the ceasefire, across Arab Gulf nations there were major concerns about the memorandum of understanding’s lack of provisions addressing nonnuclear threats like Iran’s ballistic missiles and the prospect of large sums of money going to Tehran with few strings attached.
Rubio will need to “reassure them that this is not some harbinger of a U.S. decision to leave the region or to abandon their security,” said William V. Roebuck, executive vice president of the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington and a former U.S. ambassador to Bahrain. “In fact, it’s an opportunity to enhance it.”
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