Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s appointment as acting national security adviser puts him in exclusive company as the first official to hold both titles since Henry Kissinger in the 1970s.
President Donald Trump announced on Thursday that Rubio would be acting national security adviser as he is nominating Mike Waltz, who was the national security adviser, for U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
Rubio wears multiple other hats in the administration, also serving as the acting administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the acting archivist for the United States.
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No secretary of state has served simultaneously in the national security adviser role since Kissinger, who did so from September 1973 through November 1975. Kissinger served as national security adviser for the Nixon administration and into the Ford administration from January 20, 1969, through November 3, 1975. He was sworn in as Secretary of State on September 23, 1973, and stayed in the role until the start of the Carter administration.
Months before taking the role of secretary of state in 1973, Kissinger negotiated a ceasefire in the Vietnam War, which landed him and North Vietnamese negotiator Le Duc Tho the Nobel Peace Prize.
“There is no other comparable honor. A statesman’s final test, after all, is whether he has made a contribution to the well-being of mankind,” Kissinger wrote years later.
Like Kissinger, Rubio and the Trump administration are looking to bring about a ceasefire of their own in the Russia-Ukraine War. Simultaneously, he and the foreign policy team are working to bring about peace in the Middle East and remain vigilant on China.
Rubio joined Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Thursday, shortly after being named acting national security adviser, to discuss the latest developments between Russia and Ukraine, noting that while the sides have gotten closer, they remain “a little far apart.”
“Look, we’ve gotten closer. … For the first time, you know — we haven’t known this for three years — we kind of can see what it would take for Ukraine to stop. We can see what it would take for the Russians to stop. The problem is, those two positions are still a little far apart,” he said.
Rubio also noted that at a point the president has to make a decision about how much energy to expend on the matter if the sides are not close enough to a deal, especially when there are other major foreign policy issues to be tackled:
We’re not going to give up on it in the sense that we’re not going to be ready to help if we can. But there does come a point where the president has to decide how much more time at the highest levels of our government do you dedicate it when maybe one of the two sides or both aren’t really close enough when we’ve got so many, I would argue, even more important issues going on around the world. Not that a war in Ukraine is not important, but I would say what’s happening with China is more important in the long term for the future of the world. Obviously, Iran’s nuclear ambition, you know, all these other things that we have going on. So at some point in time, it either has to be something that can happen or we’ll need to move on. That’ll be a decision the president will have to make.
Rubio later added, “It’s going to take a real breakthrough here very soon to make this possible.”
