We May Have Arrived at the 'Marco Rubio Moment'

New York Times columnist Russ Douthat pronounces Marco Rubio "the most interesting figure in the administration right now." The secretary of state is not generating the splashiest or most controversial headlines, and that's part of the point. Rubio seems to be exerting genuine influence on a hawkish foreign policy without the added baggage: He "has somehow avoided becoming either a media fixation or a major player in the right's unfolding psychodrama," writes Douthat. "He has accumulated formal power (adding the national security adviser's portfolio in a Kissingerian consolidation) without accumulating many open enemies."

Douthat writes that he "was a skeptic of Rubio's foreign policy vision in 2016" and remains skeptical of armed intervention. But he gives the administration credit for the bombing of Iran's nuclear program, which "has not produced any of the feared blowback or drawn us into a regime-change war," and for what he views as a reasonable balance of "hawkishness and dovishness" on the Russia-Ukraine war. Now the big test is Venezuela, "the place where Rubio's longstanding interests are most in play and where the administration's just-war arguments are thinnest." It may not end well, of course:

• "But it's the nature of power that its possession puts your ambitions to the test. And just the fact that we're testing a strategy of Latin American regime change is strong evidence that what never materialized in the 2016 campaign—the Marco Rubio moment—might have finally arrived." Read the full column.