Secretary of State Marco Rubio is either the luckiest or the shrewdest member of the Trump cabinet —maybe both. His good fortune has been that President Donald Trump has handed the most intractable diplomatic problems — ending the U.S.-Iran and Russia-Ukraine wars — to someone else: special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner and, in the case of Iran, to Rubio’s presumed rival for the 2028 Republican nomination, Vice President JD Vance. Neither set of negotiations is showing much progress, but Rubio escapes the fallout.
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The secretary of state is smart enough to pick on enemies that, unlike Russia or Iran, are less likely to effectively push back. In the past few weeks, Rubio has targeted the International Criminal Court (ICC), the Communist regime in Cuba and left-wing extremists in ways that are sure to please a president who is campaigning against the “communist menace” without running the risk of any serious blowback. That’s because the threats that Rubio claims to be fighting are vastly, ludicrously overblown.
In a July 13 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Rubio claimed that “U.S. soldiers, police officers, Border Patrol agents and elected leaders could be dragged before an international court, tried by judges from random countries across the globe, found guilty under international laws we neither consent to nor control, and then imprisoned thousands of miles from America.” He vowed to prevent this far-fetched scenario by dismantling the ICC — “brick by brick, if necessary.”
Yet the only time the ICC has investigated U.S. troops was in 2020, when the chief prosecutor briefly looked into alleged U.S. misconduct in Afghanistan. That investigation was soon dropped, and there has not been another ICC case involving the United States since.
Because the United States is not a party to the ICC, there is no way Border Patrol agents or police officers could possibly be indicted. There is a theoretical risk of U.S. soldiers being tried if they are accused of war crimes in countries that belong to the ICC. Elected leaders could conceivably be indicted, too, if they issue illegal orders to those soldiers. But in practice either scenario is very unlikely, because more than 100 countries have promised not to extradite Americans to The Hague. Iran is not a party to the ICC, and it would be difficult for the ICC to establish jurisdiction over seemingly unlawful U.S. attacks on alleged drug boats in international waters —especially now that Venezuela, where many of the boats are likely registered, has withdrawn from the ICC under U.S. pressure.
Perhaps Rubio is actually concerned about the threat not to the U.S. but to Israel, since the ICC issued an arrest warrant in 2024 for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (along with a now-dead Hamas commander). New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani briefly threatened to enforce the warrant when Netanyahu comes to New York, but the city’s lawyers told him he did not have the authority to do so.
The reality is that, while the court is flawed, it can also be useful — as Rubio himself recognized in 2022 when, as a senator, he supported the ICC’s investigation of Russian war crimes in Ukraine.
When not hyping the ICC threat, Rubio is hyping the Cuban threat. Last week the State Department issued a hyperbolic report that reads as if it were written by Joe McCarthy: “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism.” It claims that “the Cuban regime has waged a sustained campaign of subversion against the United States” that continues to the present day in the form of groups such as antifa and the Democratic Socialists of America. But it is heavy on history and light on evidence that current leftists are actually Cuban agents; presumably if such evidence existed, the Justice Department would indict them.
Most of the report is a walk down memory lane, blaming Cuba for supporting groups including the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers in the 1960s without mentioning the CIA’s efforts to overthrow the Cuban regime. It also alludes to the 1980s, when 49,000 Cuban personnel were deployed to Africa to support Soviet-backed regimes.
But those days are long gone. Today Cuba is a bankrupt country that, because of Marxist mismanagement and a crippling U.S. fuel blockade, can’t even keep its lights on. Its odious regime is a threat to its own people — not to the United States.
The State Department report appears to be a twofer: It can be used to support both a U.S. invasion of Cuba and a new Red Scare-style crackdown on progressive activists in the United States.
The latter motivation was obvious in the international conference that Rubio convened in mid-July to battle the supposed threat from left-wing extremism. He said that “the United States is building the infrastructure, the partnership, and the strategy to defeat the scourge of far-left terror,” but most of the examples he cited — from the Red Army Faction in West Germany to the Symbionese Liberation Army in the United States — are from the distant past.
A 2025 study from the Center for Strategic and International Studies found that left-wing violence in the U.S. has been rising in recent years but remains very low: “In the past decade … left-wing attacks have killed 13 victims, compared with 112 and 82 victims for right-wing and jihadist attacks, respectively.” The highest-profile recent cases of leftist violence were the horrifying killings of conservative activist Charlie Kirk and UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, but in neither instance has evidence emerged linking the suspect to antifa or any other group.
The U.S. government should battle violent extremists of all persuasions — not just leftists. Unfortunately, Trump pardoned the Jan. 6, 2021, rioters, who committed the most serious act of political violence in modern U.S. history.
In vastly inflating the threats from what he calls “leftist nongovernment organizations, smug globalists, and hostile Third World governments,” Rubio is not advancing U.S. national interests. But he is advancing his own by improving his standing with Trump and his followers who were initially suspicious of his MAGA bona fides. It’s no coincidence that a recent poll showed him catching up to Vance in New Hampshire. Rubio is no more principled than Vance, but he’s a cleverer politician.
What will happen in the 2026 midterms? Sign up for Margin of Victory
The secretary of state is smart enough to pick on enemies that, unlike Russia or Iran, are less likely to effectively push back. In the past few weeks, Rubio has targeted the International Criminal Court (ICC), the Communist regime in Cuba and left-wing extremists in ways that are sure to please a president who is campaigning against the “communist menace” without running the risk of any serious blowback. That’s because the threats that Rubio claims to be fighting are vastly, ludicrously overblown.
In a July 13 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Rubio claimed that “U.S. soldiers, police officers, Border Patrol agents and elected leaders could be dragged before an international court, tried by judges from random countries across the globe, found guilty under international laws we neither consent to nor control, and then imprisoned thousands of miles from America.” He vowed to prevent this far-fetched scenario by dismantling the ICC — “brick by brick, if necessary.”
Yet the only time the ICC has investigated U.S. troops was in 2020, when the chief prosecutor briefly looked into alleged U.S. misconduct in Afghanistan. That investigation was soon dropped, and there has not been another ICC case involving the United States since.
Because the United States is not a party to the ICC, there is no way Border Patrol agents or police officers could possibly be indicted. There is a theoretical risk of U.S. soldiers being tried if they are accused of war crimes in countries that belong to the ICC. Elected leaders could conceivably be indicted, too, if they issue illegal orders to those soldiers. But in practice either scenario is very unlikely, because more than 100 countries have promised not to extradite Americans to The Hague. Iran is not a party to the ICC, and it would be difficult for the ICC to establish jurisdiction over seemingly unlawful U.S. attacks on alleged drug boats in international waters —especially now that Venezuela, where many of the boats are likely registered, has withdrawn from the ICC under U.S. pressure.
Perhaps Rubio is actually concerned about the threat not to the U.S. but to Israel, since the ICC issued an arrest warrant in 2024 for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (along with a now-dead Hamas commander). New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani briefly threatened to enforce the warrant when Netanyahu comes to New York, but the city’s lawyers told him he did not have the authority to do so.
The reality is that, while the court is flawed, it can also be useful — as Rubio himself recognized in 2022 when, as a senator, he supported the ICC’s investigation of Russian war crimes in Ukraine.
When not hyping the ICC threat, Rubio is hyping the Cuban threat. Last week the State Department issued a hyperbolic report that reads as if it were written by Joe McCarthy: “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism.” It claims that “the Cuban regime has waged a sustained campaign of subversion against the United States” that continues to the present day in the form of groups such as antifa and the Democratic Socialists of America. But it is heavy on history and light on evidence that current leftists are actually Cuban agents; presumably if such evidence existed, the Justice Department would indict them.
Most of the report is a walk down memory lane, blaming Cuba for supporting groups including the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers in the 1960s without mentioning the CIA’s efforts to overthrow the Cuban regime. It also alludes to the 1980s, when 49,000 Cuban personnel were deployed to Africa to support Soviet-backed regimes.
But those days are long gone. Today Cuba is a bankrupt country that, because of Marxist mismanagement and a crippling U.S. fuel blockade, can’t even keep its lights on. Its odious regime is a threat to its own people — not to the United States.
The State Department report appears to be a twofer: It can be used to support both a U.S. invasion of Cuba and a new Red Scare-style crackdown on progressive activists in the United States.
The latter motivation was obvious in the international conference that Rubio convened in mid-July to battle the supposed threat from left-wing extremism. He said that “the United States is building the infrastructure, the partnership, and the strategy to defeat the scourge of far-left terror,” but most of the examples he cited — from the Red Army Faction in West Germany to the Symbionese Liberation Army in the United States — are from the distant past.
A 2025 study from the Center for Strategic and International Studies found that left-wing violence in the U.S. has been rising in recent years but remains very low: “In the past decade … left-wing attacks have killed 13 victims, compared with 112 and 82 victims for right-wing and jihadist attacks, respectively.” The highest-profile recent cases of leftist violence were the horrifying killings of conservative activist Charlie Kirk and UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, but in neither instance has evidence emerged linking the suspect to antifa or any other group.
The U.S. government should battle violent extremists of all persuasions — not just leftists. Unfortunately, Trump pardoned the Jan. 6, 2021, rioters, who committed the most serious act of political violence in modern U.S. history.
In vastly inflating the threats from what he calls “leftist nongovernment organizations, smug globalists, and hostile Third World governments,” Rubio is not advancing U.S. national interests. But he is advancing his own by improving his standing with Trump and his followers who were initially suspicious of his MAGA bona fides. It’s no coincidence that a recent poll showed him catching up to Vance in New Hampshire. Rubio is no more principled than Vance, but he’s a cleverer politician.
