Rubio’s absence from Iran talks highlights stay-at-home role

WASHINGTON – When then US President Barack Obama negotiated a nuclear deal with Iran more than a decade ago, his point man was Secretary of State John Kerry. Over 20 months of talks, Mr Kerry met his Iranian counterpart on at least 18 different days, often several times a day.

High-level nuclear diplomacy was a natural role for the top US diplomat. Secretaries of state traditionally take the lead on the country’s biggest diplomatic tasks, from arms control treaties to Israeli-Palestinian agreements.

But as US President Donald Trump prepares to send a delegation to the latest round of US-Iran talks in Pakistan this weekend, his Secretary of State, Mr Marco Rubio, will remain where he often does: at home.

Mr Rubio did not attend the last US meeting with Iran earlier in April. Nor did he join several meetings held over the past year in Geneva and Doha, Qatar. He has also been absent from US delegations abroad working to settle the war in Ukraine and Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip. Despite a long period of crisis and war in the region, he has not visited the Middle East since a brief stop in Israel in October 2025.

In recent months, Mr Rubio – consumed with his second role as Mr Trump’s national security adviser – has not travelled much at all.

During the Biden administration, Secretary of State Antony Blinken made 11 foreign trips from January 2024 to late April 2024, stopping in roughly three dozen cities, according to the State Department. So far in 2026, Mr Rubio has visited six foreign cities, including a stop in Milan for the 2026 Winter Olympics.

Mr Trump has outsourced much of his diplomacy to others, including his friend Steve Witkoff, a wealthy associate from the world of Manhattan real estate, and his son-in-law Jared Kushner. Mr Witkoff and Mr Kushner have spearheaded diplomacy with Israel, Ukraine and Russia, as well as Iran, whose delegation they will meet for a second time in April in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital.

Mr Rubio’s distance from the trenches of diplomacy reflects his dual role on Mr Trump’s national security team. For the past year, he has served as the White House national security adviser even while leading the State Department – the first person to do so since Mr Henry Kissinger in the mid-1970s.

The secretary of state runs the State Department, overseeing US diplomats and embassies worldwide, as well as Washington-based policymakers.

Working from the White House, the national security adviser coordinates departments and agencies, including the State Department, to develop policy advice for the president.

The twin roles reflect Mr Rubio’s influence with Mr Trump, and offer him a way to maintain it. For Mr Rubio, less time abroad means more time at the side of an impulsive president prone to making critical national security decisions at any moment.

As Mr Witkoff, Mr Kushner and Vice-President J.D. Vance met Iranian officials in Pakistan earlier in April, Mr Rubio was at Mr Trump’s side at an Ultimate Fighting Championship event, noted Dr Emma Ashford, an analyst of US diplomacy at the nonpartisan Stimson Center in Washington.

“Rubio clearly prefers to stay close to Trump,” Dr Ashford said.

Mr Rubio accepted the national security adviser job on an acting basis in May 2025 after Mr Trump reassigned the job’s previous occupant, Mr Michael Waltz. But officials say that Mr Rubio is expected to keep it indefinitely.

That arrangement is not inherently bad, Dr Ashford added. And she noted that previous presidents had entrusted major diplomatic tasks to people other than the secretary of state. Then President Joe Biden delegated his Central Intelligence Agency director, Mr William Burns, to handle diplomacy with Russia and ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas, for instance.

But she echoed the complaints by many current and former diplomats that Mr Rubio seems less like someone performing both jobs than a national security adviser who sometimes shows up at the State Department.

“I do think it’s to the detriment of the whole Department of State and to America’s ability to conduct diplomacy in general that we effectively have the secretary of state position sitting vacant,” she said.

Mr Tommy Pigott, a State Department spokesman, contested such claims.

“Anyone trying to paint Secretary Rubio’s close coordination with the White House and other agencies as a negative could not be more wrong,” he said. “We now have an NSC and State Department that are totally in sync, a goal that has eluded past administrations for decades.”

Mr Rubio divides his time between the State Department and the White House, often spending time at both in the same day. In an interview with Politico in June, he said he visited the State Department “almost every day”.

While there, he often meets visiting dignitaries before returning to the White House.

Last week, he presided over a meeting at the State Department between Lebanese and Israeli officials that set the stage for a ceasefire in Lebanon.

His twin jobs “really do overlap in many cases”, he said.

“In many cases, you end up being in the same meetings or in the same places; there’s just one less person in there, if you think about it,” he added.

“A lot of people would come to Washington, for example, for meetings, and they’d want to meet the national security adviser and then meet me as secretary of state. Now they can do both in one meeting.”

Asked about his travel schedule during a news conference in December, he said he had less reason to travel abroad because “we have a lot of leaders constantly coming here” to visit Mr Trump at the White House.

Mr Rubio also joins Mr Trump’s foreign trips in his capacity as national security adviser.

Many national security veterans call the arrangement unwise, saying that both jobs are extremely demanding and incompatible with one another.

It was not easy even for Mr Kissinger, who had firmly established himself over more than four years as national security adviser before persuading then President Richard Nixon to let him take on an additional role as secretary of state in 1973. (In a reversal of Mr Rubio’s approach, Mr Kissinger was in constant motion, including a round of Middle East shuttle diplomacy that kept him on the road for 33 straight days.)

“In general, it’s a mistake to combine those roles,” said Professor Matthew Waxman, who held senior roles at the National Security Council, State Department and the Pentagon during the George W. Bush administration.

“That said, it’s not necessarily a bad thing that a dual-hatted Rubio is so off-screen right now,” he added. “Especially while so much attention is focused on high-wire diplomacy with Iran, someone needs to manage foreign policy around the rest of the world.” NYTIMES