Senate confirmation hearings for Marco Rubio, President-elect Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, began Wednesday. The hearings were initially marred by protestors objecting to Rubio’s support for sanctions on Latin American governments hostile to American interests including Cuba and Venezuela.
The interests and position of the United States with regard to China was one of the major topics of the hearing. When asked by Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-NE) if he agreed that China is the biggest national security threat to the U.S., Rubio replied that he agreed “100 percent” and asserted that “the Chinese believe the U.S. are a great power in inevitable decline, and they are on an inevitable rise… The danger is, because of our own actions, a dangerous imbalance has built up in that relationship.”
Rubio emphasized that a great power competition with China has serious potential consequences for the U.S. domestically because of the country’s technical and industrial capacity. “If we stay on the road we are on right now,” he said, “in less than 10 years, virtually everything that matters to us in life will depend on whether China allows us to have it or not.”
Rubio was also questioned on his position on American aid to Ukraine. When Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) asked him how his views on Ukraine have developed, Rubio noted that the conflict has become a war of attrition that will prevent both Russia from conquering the country and prevent Ukraine from pushing the Russians from their claimed territory. As such, Rubio said, he agreed with President-elect Trump’s assertion that “the killing must stop.”
“This war has to end,” he said, “and I think it should be the official policy of the United States that we want to see it end.”
Rubio also issued a sharp rebuke to the post–Cold War American foreign policy establishment:
Out of the triumphalism out of the end of the long Cold War emerged a bipartisan consensus… that we had reached the end of history; that all of the nations of the world would now become members of the democratic, Western-led community; that a foreign policy that served the national interest could now be replaced by one that served the liberal world order; and that all mankind was now destined to abandon national sovereignty and national identity and become citizens of the world… We now know this was a dangerous delusion… The postwar global order is not just obsolete—it is now a weapon being used against us.
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