President-elect Donald Trump has picked Florida’s three-term senator Marco Rubio to be his nominee for secretary of state, setting the tone for a more hawkish administration on U.S. foreign policy.
“Marco is a Highly Respected Leader, and a very powerful Voice for Freedom,” Trump wrote in a Nov. 13 statement.
“He will be a strong Advocate for our Nation, a true friend to our Allies, and a fearless Warrior who will never back down to our adversaries. I look forward to working with Marco to Make America, and the World, Safe and Great Again!”
The selection, pending Senate confirmation, will make Rubio the first Latino to serve as the nation’s top diplomat.
In a statement to The Epoch Times, Rubio thanked Trump for trusting him with the “tremendous responsibility.”
“I will work every day to carry out his foreign policy agenda,” he said. “We will deliver peace through strength and always put the interests of Americans and America above all else.”
Upon Trump’s victory, Rubio said on Nov. 6 that the United States would pursue a more “pragmatic foreign policy,” pointing to the growing axis between North Korea, Iran, China, and Russia.
Rubio will be taking up the position as the United States confronts a far more precarious world, with war between Russia and Ukraine, conflict in the Middle East, and communist China’s military belligerence in the South China Sea.
A Focus on China
Trump and Rubio came head to head in the 2016 GOP presidential primary and repeatedly traded insults. But after Trump assumed office in 2017, the two worked together on foreign policy issues, particularly the strategy toward Latin America. Rubio was one of Trump’s vice presidential finalists until July 15, when Trump announced Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) as his running mate.
As the vice ranking member of the Select Committee on Intelligence and a senior member of the Committee on Foreign Relations, Rubio has been pressing for a harder line toward human rights violators such as China.
His lawmaking draws on a tough-on-China approach, placing countering the Chinese regime as a top priority while calling out Beijing’s ambition to topple the United States and dominate the world through trade theft and coercion.
“The leverage China potentially has over America and the West is extraordinary. They have the ability to disrupt our economy right now because we depend way too much on them for both basic raw materials and also finished production of goods, and that’s only growing,” Rubio said in an interview with EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” in 2022.
China’s outsized role in manufacturing came into focus during the COVID-19 pandemic as Beijing’s draconian lockdowns disrupted global supply chains.
“Imagine if they decide to deny us the same things, but not because of a pandemic, but because they want to threaten us into not getting involved in whatever it is they’re deciding to do around the world,” he said, citing the U.S. dependence on China for antibiotics, generic drugs, lithium-ion battery cells, and textiles.
If Beijing decides to mount an invasion on Taiwan, the island neighbor that is now seeing heightened Chinese military pressure, these could be the levers the regime could weaponize against the United States, he said.
Rubio once heard an airplane maker complain about losing Chinese clients to a European supplier over U.S. tariffs. With that kind of profit-driven mindset across industries, Beijing’s economic leverage over the United States is significant.
But more important than the interests of one company or sector is the overall picture, he said, noting that “we have all sorts of industries” that benefit from slave and forced labor in China-based production chains “because it’s cheaper.”
“Our job is to act in the best interest of the United States of America,” he said.
In the same vein, he worked with the House Select Committee on China to propose a bill barring the U.S. tax code from rewarding China-bound investments and to push other federal departments to act on national security concerns involving Chinese firms.
In a September report titled “The World China Made: ‘Made in China 2025’ Nine Years Later,” Rubio reviewed China’s industrial policies and made a case for a “whole-of-society effort” as a response.
A member of the Congressional–Executive Commission on China since 2015, he cites the Chinese regime’s ambition to supplant the United States as the global leader as one driving force for his human rights advocacy.
He recently called out global consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers for “appeasing communist China” by providing services to Xinjiang authorities amid ongoing human rights abuses against Uyghur Muslims and supporting Chinese geopolitical ambitions that undercut American interests.
A measure he led in the Senate called the Falun Gong Protection Act, which has already passed the House, aims to sanction perpetrators of forced organ harvesting who are targeting practitioners of the persecuted faith.
Political Career
Rubio started his political career as a West Miami city commissioner in the 1990s before being elected to Florida’s House of Representatives in 2000. He served as the speaker of the Florida House from 2006 to 2008, when term limits ended his tenure at the state Legislature.
During a two-year period before the speakership role, he traveled around the state, hosting town-hall-style meetings to solicit Floridians’ views on how to build the state’s future.
Rubio chose the 100 best ideas and published the book “100 Innovative Ideas for Florida’s Future,” which served as the basis for his political platform. Former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich called the effort a “work of genius,” and the state Legislature has ultimately acted on more than half of the ideas it lists.
He briefly taught at Florida International University before winning the U.S. Senate election in 2010 in a three-way race, a seat he has since held.
The nonpartisan Center for Effective Lawmaking in March 2023 rated Rubio as the second most effective Republican senator in the 117th Congress and the third most effective in the Senate overall. He was ranked No. 1 during the 116th.
Rubio has long opposed Ukraine funding. In April, he voted against a $95 billion aid bill that also included $26 billion in assistance to Israel and $8 billion for Taiwan, arguing that addressing the U.S. immigration crisis should take higher priority.
He said last week that he believes the United States is “funding a stalemate that’s costing lives” and called for the Russia–Ukraine war to be brought to a close.
“China would love for us to be bogged down in Europe in a conflict and not focused on what’s happening in the Indo-Pacific, where, every day, they are threatening not just Taiwan but the Philippines,” he said on a Catholic-themed cable network.
Rubio will likely have an easy time securing Senate approval. His Pennsylvania colleague, John Fetterman, was the first Democrat to voice support.
“Unsurprisingly, the other team’s pick will have political differences than my own,” Fetterman wrote on social media platform X on Nov. 12. “That being said, my colleague [Rubio] is a strong choice and I look forward to voting for his confirmation.”
Terri Wu contributed to this report.