As Rubio drives Trump’s war agenda, Vance and MAGA base confused

U.S. Vice-President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio represent different worldviews within the Make America Great Again (MAGA) universe, though both present their politics in terms of Christian civilisational nationalism. A fundamental principle of MAGA politics has been an opposition to America’s “endless wars” — the phrase Mr. Trump deployed in three consecutive election campaigns.

In his 2025 inaugural address, he declared that the power of the U.S. “will stop all wars and bring a new spirit of unity to a world that has been angry, violent and totally unpredictable”. Mr. Trump touted not starting a new war as a big achievement of his first term. Mr. Vance is a MAGA native on the war question, while Mr. Rubio was a late, reluctant convert. The new American war in West Asia marks an eclipse of Mr. Vance and the prominence of Mr. Rubio. The MAGA base lay scattered and orphaned as their messiah, Mr. Trump, has himself abandoned the flock and joined the pipers of war.

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Two visions

The distinction between the visions of Mr. Vance and Mr. Rubio is most legible in their Munich Security Conference speeches, separated by one year. In February 2025, Mr. Vance chided European leaders for abandoning and turning against their own people. Mr. Vance has always focused on repairing the internal strife within Christian societies and reclaiming them from godless globalist liberals. He did not hesitate to invoke faith as the ground of his argument, citing the prosecution of a Christian activist in Sweden and “a humble Christian praying in her own home” in Britain as emblems of self-betrayal.

In Mr. Vance’s worldview, the restoration of nationalism is an internal process for each country to undertake, and the U.S. must look within and restore itself rather than get involved in any other region or country, regardless of how strong the moral case could be. “The threat that I worry most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia, not China, it’s not any other external actor,” he had said. “What I worry about is the threat from within.” He did not want the U.S. to be involved in defending Ukraine either. Russia, in the Vance side of the MAGA worldview, is a civilisational ally, not an adversary.

Mr. Rubio arrived at the same podium a year later, in February 2026, and inhabited a different universe entirely. Mr. Rubio always considered the Christian mission as a global enterprise to be helmed by the West. “We are part of one civilization — Western civilization,” Mr. Rubio declared at the MSC, and connected the expansion of European empires to Christianity, lamenting that the expansion had been in retreat since the Second World War.

United by heritage

For five centuries until 1945, he said, the West had been expanding — its missionaries, pilgrims, soldiers and explorers crossing oceans, settling continents, building empires. Mr. Rubio also invoked the spectre of communism — a trope that for decades united liberals and evangelicals against the erstwhile Soviet Union, and its successor, Russia. Mr. Rubio echoed MAGA talking points against global institutions, the decline of mass manufacturing, and mass migration in the West, but his speech stood in stark contrast to Mr. Vance’s on the emphasis of rectification. For Mr. Rubio, all of Western Europe and the U.S. are united by heritage; he overlooks the internal divisions that Mr. Vance underscores for repair. The Sistine Chapel and the spires of Cologne cathedral, he said, “testify not just to the greatness of our past or to a faith in God — they foreshadow the wonders that await us in our future.”

Mr. Vance’s speech stunned the European ruling elite in the room, while Mr. Rubio earned applause. Soon after the war trumpets blew against Iran, European governments found in Mr. Rubio’s civilisational framing a more congenial foundation on which to rally behind the Trump administration’s new war.

Mr. Rubio’s MSC speech blended MAGA talking points with neoconservative priorities and the preoccupations of European establishment leaders, packaging it in the idiom that Mr. Trump finds instinctively appealing. The U.N., he said, was “powerless to constrain the nuclear programme of radical Shia clerics in Tehran,” and it took bombing ordered by Mr. Trump. An old-school Christian Republican who revolted at Mr. Trump’s declared opposition to interventions, and who was particularly aligned with Israel, Mr. Rubio had run against Mr. Trump in 2016 with something close to contempt — revolted specifically by the suggestion that America’s wars had been a mistake. Mr. Rubio believed they had not been. He believed they had been mismanaged. Mr. Vance had found in Mr. Trump a vehicle for the culture war he had theorised: the working class abandoned by liberal elites, communities hollowed out, faith mocked. His anti-interventionism was always a consequence of this worldview. You cannot fight for your people abroad if you have already abandoned them at home.

For a while, the contradiction between the two men coexisted inside the same administration. Mr. Trump seemed content to let it stand, mirroring his own conflict between allegiance to Israel and reluctance for war. His campaign had cast Mr. Trump as the peace candidate. His deputy chief of staff, Mr. Stephen Miller, wrote in November 2024 that “warmongering neocons love sending your kids to die for wars they would never fight themselves.”

Neocon project

The war against Iran has ended the ambiguity. A war against Iran was always the neoconservative project — the final item on a checklist that began in Afghanistan, continued in Iraq, detoured through Libya and Syria, and always had Tehran as its terminus. The architects of that project were never really gone. They regrouped, rebranded, waited. Mr. Rubio had not converted himself to the MAGA slogans he professed for the crowd, it turns out. He has instead converted the MAGA messiah himself —Mr. Trump, no less.

MAGA’s anti-war base is orphaned. Former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of Mr. Trump’s most loyal campaigners, put it with characteristic bluntness, when the war was about to begin: “This is the Trump I supported, the man who called out the truth about the Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) in Iraq and declared NO MORE FOREIGN WARS. Now for some unknown reason, Trump has joined the neocons and will soon go to war against Iran with the same BS excuses. End of MAGA.”

The call for internal restoration, and the liberation of the Christian nation from globalists as preached at MAGA pulpits, are now muffled under the renewed campaign for global civilisational dominance that Mr. Rubio spoke about in Munich. The flock has been told, by the man it trusted most, that it was wrong about what he believed.

Published – March 01, 2026 06:26 pm IST