Kiriakou devoted part of a February 2025 commentary to the incoming Secretary of State, and began by saying he was as mystified as anybody as to why Donald Trump had chosen Marco Rubio for the job.[1]
The objection to Rubio
The basis of the puzzlement is ideological placement. Rubio, in Kiriakou’s description, is a Republican in the mould of George W. Bush and every other neoconservative who came before him. He is known, Kiriakou said, for especially hardcore stances against Cuba and against Venezuela.[1]
The implied inconsistency is with the rest of the administration’s stated foreign policy, on which Kiriakou had just said he was hoping for restraint — an end to the war in Ukraine, staying out of other countries’ business, leaving Syria alone, and eventually some form of agreement with Iran.[2]
Cuba
On Cuba, Kiriakou spoke partly from a recent visit. He had gone the previous year and had met ordinary Cubans on the street as well as official ones — a group of Americans he was with had dinner with one of the country’s vice-presidents and discussed relations between the two states.[3]
His conclusion was flat: he was not at all sanguine that Trump, or Rubio acting on Trump’s behalf, would do anything at all to improve United States relations with Cuba.[3]
Venezuela
Venezuela he judged worse. What the country would see under Trump, he predicted, was a continuation of the Joe Biden policy on Venezuela — which had in turn been a continuation of the first Trump administration’s policy.[4]
The phrase he used for the result is the one worth recording: the two countries would remain in a virtual state of war, and nothing good would come of it.[4]
The structure of the prediction is characteristic. Kiriakou does not treat Venezuela policy as a partisan variable at all; he treats it as an inherited setting that successive administrations of both parties have declined to change, and Rubio’s appointment as confirmation that nobody intended to.