David Sanger

I think many of the protesters in the ground are going to say, what you've just done is help cement the current regime in place for another couple of years.

Thanks a lot.

Interesting question.

In the State of the Union speech on Tuesday night, President Trump had this line where he said he wanted to praise the man who Mr. Kushner and Mr. Witkoff report to.

Marco Rubio.

And there was applause for Rubio, who of course is not only Secretary of State, but also National Security Advisor.

The last person who held both posts simultaneously was Henry Kissinger back in the Ford administration.

The interesting question right now is, is Rubio really deeply involved in the Iran confrontation?

Has he even taken a major position on it?

Because we saw his fingerprints all over Venezuela.

There are many who believe that Marco Rubio, whose family, of course, initially came from Cuba, is deeply interested in trying to bring about regime change in Cuba.

He made no secret of that when he was a senator.

But we haven't seen him be extremely vocal or particularly involved in the Iran negotiations, though we assume that he is in the room with J.D.

Vance and a few others when the major decisions are being made.

Well, certainly if you listen to him prior to his election, he was deeply averse to foreign intervention and particularly to the American commitment to Ukraine.

Before he was even running for vice president, he showed up at the Munich Security Conference and made the public case for the U.S.

to basically pull back from support of Ukraine and certainly from ever allowing Ukraine into NATO, which was considered at the time to be heresy and today is sort of national policy.

So one has to assume that he was deeply concerned about Venezuela, right?

But as we indicated earlier, that wasn't a full military attack on Venezuela.

That was a snatch and grab operation to seize the leader.