QUESTION: I want to start with the report
that came out today from Gabe Kaminsky and Maddie Rowley, and it’s about this
major reorganization that is now underway in your State Department. It is the
largest shakeup at the State Department in decades -- something like 132 offices
are being cut; there’s many other details -- and I want to understand the
significance here beyond cost cutting. How does this reorganization help advance
American interests and the President’s foreign policy abroad?
SECSTATE RUBIO: Well, I think that’s
important to point out. This is not a cost-cutting exercise, although it
certainly will provide savings to the American taxpayer. This is a policy
exercise, and here’s why. Foreign policy -- mature foreign policy, realistic
foreign policy -- requires the balancing of both policy geopolitical
considerations, which often involve pragmatism, and some level of idealism --
the promotion, for example, of human rights or democracy and things of that
nature. So this sort of balance.
Well, today those two entities are housed in two different places. We have a
group of people that are our regions -- our embassies and our regional bureaus
that oversee those embassies -- and they’re involved in balancing our
relationships with these countries; and then you have these other entities that
are only so -- looking at issues from a single-source standpoint: human rights,
human trafficking, whatever it may be.
These two have to be brought together. And so we get rid of those bureaus that
are what they call functional bureaus, and instead we move that function --
we’re not getting rid of, for example, a group of people that care about human
rights, but we’re putting those people in the regions and in the embassies so
that all of our foreign policy is being balanced within those bureaus. So say
it’s Western Hemisphere; it’s being balanced within the Western Hemisphere, and
then ultimately empowering our embassies to pursue mature foreign policy that
takes all of these factors into account.
So it really is about streamlining an entity that’s continued to grow. If I --
if I show you the org chart of what the State Department looked like in the ’70s
and what it looks like today, it’s unrecognizable. So we have to bring back some
stability, some organizational streamlining that allows us to further foreign
policy in a way that balances all of the things we have to take into
consideration when we pursue foreign policy, and we can deliver it efficiently
and fast.
One more point. I know it’s been a long answer to a very short question, but
it’s important to talk about it. As the Secretary of State, I get these memos.
They’re called these decision memos. And if you look at all of the boxes that
have to be checked before it even gets to me, in some cases it has to be checked
by six or seven people in one bureau alone before it gets to me. That’s way too
long. It almost renders the State Department irrelevant. We have to shorten that
approval process, and the way to do it is to get rid of all of these offices
that are all chiming in, any one of whom could slow action for an indefinite
period of time.
QUESTION: Secretary, if you are a normal
American and you don’t know much about the bureaucracy at the State Department
and you just look at the headline out of today, you will see that many of the
offices that are being cut seem to broadly be about America’s soft power role in
the world -- things like the promotion of human rights, fighting extremism,
promoting democracy abroad. And I think critics of the administration are
already saying in reaction to this news this is sort of yet another sign that
the Trump Administration is pulling back from the world and leaving the vacuum
to be filled by other contenders like China and Russia. What does that
perspective get wrong? Is this a sign that America is no longer in the soft
power business?
SECSTATE RUBIO: Yeah. Well, first of
all, I’m not -- I don’t think anyone should be too enthusiastic about China or
Russia promoting human rights or democracy anywhere in the world. So it’s not
like they’re going to displace us from that. No, what this means --
QUESTION: No, no, no, they don’t mean -- I’m
sorry. They don’t mean displacing America from the human rights promotion
business.
SECSTATE RUBIO: Right.
QUESTION: Simply that in the same way that
China advances its own interests in Africa through the Belt and Road Initiative
--
SECSTATE RUBIO: Right.
QUESTION: -- America has historically after
the Cold War, as you know, advanced ours through many of these offices.
SECSTATE RUBIO: Right.
QUESTION: And
people say we should still be in that business, and I think the Trump
Administration has a different answer to that. So --
SECSTATE RUBIO: Well, the answer is we still are, but we’re going to do it in a
way that’s balanced across all of our other equities. So, for example, we’re
still going to be involved in those things, caring about human rights, but it’s
going to be run at the embassy and regional level, not out of some office in
Washington, D.C. that has that title. And so just -- we need to be grown-ups here
about how we talk about this. Promoting democracy and human rights in our
relations, for example, with some country in the Middle East is probably going
to look different than it would with some country in Central America or South
America. That’s just a geopolitical reality.
In geopolitical reality, we are going to have to have partnerships and alliances
with countries whose system of government maybe is not like ours, whose view on
religious tolerance, for example, may not be like ours. And we may not like that
and it doesn’t mean we don’t wish it was different, but we still have to have
relations with these countries because it serves a geopolitical purpose, it
serves the national interest of the United States. The national interest of the
United States in the Middle East is stability. The national interest of the
United States in the Middle East is preventing groups that would attack us here
in the homeland from taking root. The national interest of the United States in
Central America is different. It’s migration, it’s drugs, it’s hoping to have
countries that are prosperous so people don’t migrate here and don’t join drug
cartels.
So we have to have foreign policies in different parts of the world that are
different, and we have to have the regions and the embassies run it, not some
office in Washington that sort of applies the same standard all across the
board. That’s just not realistic foreign policy in today’s world.
QUESTION: Twenty years ago, I think if you asked the secretary of state and
certainly the president “Is the national interest of the United States stability
or democracy?” I think they might have said democracy instead of stability. Was
that view wrong? Was it foolish?
SECSTATE RUBIO: I think -- well, I think it was a different world. If you go
back 20 years, we were a unipolar power, and we were often called in to do
things because nobody else could or would. We don’t live in that world anymore.
We now live in a world with a near peer adversary in China. We live in a world
where, while Russia’s economy is not large, they have the ability to project
power and destabilize. We live in a world with a nuclear-armed North Korea, with
a nuclear-ambitious Iran. We live in a world where there are both opportunities
and real challenges in the Middle East. We live in the world where in Africa
countries are going in two directions: Some are developing economically; others
are falling into chaos. It’s just a very different world.
And in that world with that many problems, especially big ones like China, the
United States has to make a mature decision about how to prioritize the use of
our national power. There are some issues in the world that matter more than
others from our national interest perspective. That doesn’t mean we don’t care
about some terrible humanitarian crisis somewhere on the planet, but we can’t
put that ahead of some critical long-term challenge to the national interest of
the United States.
So we have entered an era where we have to -- we are the most powerful country in
the world, but neither our power nor our resources have ever been infinite. And
so we have to prioritize them in a mature and sustainable way in this new era
which we live in. It’s a -- in essence the world order is changing, and we need
to adjust our foreign policies to serve our national interest in that new world
that’s taking shape.
QUESTION: Okay. Well, let’s talk about what I think is arguably the biggest
story in America right now, which is the fight over deportations. I’m curious
how that should rank in terms of priorities that you just lined up for me, but
the President suggested in an Oval Office meeting with President Bukele of El
Salvador that American citizens might be deported to El Salvador.
Here’s what he said. He said that Bukele, in addition to the prison -- I think
it’s pronounced CECOT; you’ll correct me if I’m wrong -- might have to build new
places to house deported American citizens. And over the weekend, your old
colleague in the Senate, John Kennedy, a Republican from Louisiana -- hardly a
squish -- he was unequivocal in saying that the President cannot do such a thing.
He said we have our own laws, we have the 8th Amendment to the Constitution; we
shouldn’t send prisoners to foreign countries. So is he correct? Should we take
the President seriously but not literally in that Oval Office meeting? Which is
it?
SECSTATE RUBIO: Well, two things. First, the President talked about the most
dangerous and vile criminals imaginable, and the question is whether you could
send them to be in a prison in some other country. But the second point the
President made -- and I was there when he said it and I was there when said it in
the past -- is I don’t know about the legalities of that, you’ll have to ask DOJ,
maybe that’s not possible because of our laws. So he acknowledged that in his
statement.
I think the broader point on deportations -- and it’s the one that really is in
the news these days -- is we have people here illegally in this country from
other countries, and one of the things we’ve done at the State Department is
work with those countries to take back their citizens, to take back people that
are -- that’s where you deport people. You deport them back to the country that
they came from. They are unlawfully in the country, and that’s where they’re
supposed to be returned, and that’s what we’ve worked on doing.
In the case of El Salvador, in addition to that, they’ve been willing to take
Tren de Aragua gang members because Venezuela was refusing to take them. And
this is now a designated terrorist organization, one of the most dangerous gangs
in the history of the world, that’s infiltrated our country, and we want them
out of our country. We don’t want them in our country.
QUESTION: One of the things the President and you have done in the past
90-something days -- it feels like it’s been a lot longer than that -- has been to successfully
-- I cannot even imagine how long it’s felt for you --
has been to successfully close the southern border. And yet, that story has been
just totally overtaken with the story of some of these individual deportations
that have captured the national conversation and that many people, even people
that voted for Trump, are opposed to.
And so I want to just ask you a bigger question, which is: What message is the
President trying to send with these deportations? There’s -- is it about
deterring people from coming? Or is it about terrifying people that have been
here for years, that have paid taxes for many, many years, and might even have
American children? Should they be scared of deportation? Like what is the
message that the President and the State Department is trying to send?
SECSTATE RUBIO: Well, so two things. The State Department isn’t involved
necessarily in the issue of migratory enforcement. We’re involved in making sure
that foreign countries take back the citizens that are in our country illegally
of their countries. So I would say two things.
Number one, mass migration is almost entirely based on an incentive system.
People were coming to this country under Joe Biden because they knew if they got
to the border and claimed asylum, said these magic words, they would be allowed
to come in and they would be allowed to stay -- almost 90 percent success rate if
you said the magic words, so people were coming.
Now they know that if they come they won’t get to stay, and they’ve stopped
coming, which is why it’s the most secure border we’ve had in modern history.
And in fact, we’ve seen a new phenomenon, which is people that were on their way
here sort of do a U-turn and go back. We’ve seen that play out. And that’s an
enormous achievement, because it stops the problem.
That still leaves us with a fundamental challenge, and that is that we have in
this country millions of people -- some who have been here many years, some who
have been here for a year and a half or two -- who are unlawfully in the United
States. And it’s this simple: If you say the speed zone is 70 miles an hour, but
people know they’re not going to get a ticket unless they go 90 miles an hour,
no one’s going to drive under the speed limit. You have to have laws, and laws
have to be enforced. If you don’t enforce your laws, then your laws become
meaningless. And that’s what’s happened in this country over the last 20 years.
We were not enforcing our immigration laws, and now we are.
Obviously, they’re going to prioritize the most dangerous people, dangerous
criminals. If you look at the manifest of these flights of people that are being
deported, these are some of the most vile human beings imaginable that we’re
getting out of our country -- sex offenders, rapists, killers. That’s who we’re
prioritizing being sent out.
But let there be no doubt we have immigration laws, and if you are in violation
of those immigration laws, you have no right to be in the country. Now, some
will choose to leave voluntarily; others may get caught up and be forced to
leave. But we are -- they are prioritizing the most dangerous.
But that said, you have to have -- there’s no point in having immigration laws if
you have no intent to enforce them.
QUESTION: Okay, let’s talk about Iran. Both you and President Trump were
profoundly opposed to Barack Obama’s nuclear deal known as the JCPOA, the Iran
deal. And this is what the President said in 2018 when he withdrew from the
deal: “The Iran deal was one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the
United States has ever entered into.” You yourself called it disastrous. Now it
looks like the administration is heading into another deal. So, simple question:
What would a good deal with Iran look like?
SECSTATE RUBIO: Well, we have good people negotiating that and involved in it,
obviously. Let me just say a couple things about the previous deal, and then
I’ll compare it to now. The previous deal was bad for a number of reasons. It
gave Iran immediate and full sanctions relief in exchange for enrichment
capabilities that at any point could be weaponized in the future. They got to
keep that permanently, they got to keep the sanctions relief permanently, and
they only had to live by the enrichment limitations for a defined period of
time. In fact, right now we are entering that period of time in which the
requirements of that deal would have expired. So it was a bad deal all the way
around. We gave them permanent concessions for temporary concessions on their
part. So now we’ve reached that point.
Let me make a second point, and that is the worst thing that could -- we do not
want a war. We do not want to see war. This is not a president that campaigned
on starting wars. And as he has said very clearly, Iran is not going to have a
nuclear weapon, and he reserves every right to prevent that from happening, but
he would prefer it not happen. He would prefer that there not be need to resort
to military force, either by us or anybody else. He would prefer that it be
something that we can negotiate.
The Iranians have shown a willingness to talk. We’re going to talk to them. If
there is a chance of peace, we’re going to give peace and a peaceful resolution
to this challenge every opportunity to succeed. Our priorities remain the same.
If Iran wants a civil nuclear program, they can have one just like many other
countries in the world have one, and that is they import enriched material.
Now, we’re not going to negotiate this in the press, we’re not going to
negotiate this publicly, because it undermines negotiations. But there’s a
pathway to a civil, peaceful nuclear program if they want one. But if they
insist on enriching, then they will be the only country in the world that
doesn’t have a “weapons program,” quote-unquote, but is enriching. And so I
think that’s problematic.
But again, let’s give peace every chance here to succeed. I don’t want to see a
war, the President certainly doesn’t want to see one either.
QUESTION: Some who are watching these negotiations unfold and who have watched
the JCPOA and then its unraveling are warning that this deal is on a path,
potentially, to be similar or weaker to the JCPOA. And one of the reasons
they’re saying that is because Steve Witkoff gave an interview in which he said
that the goal should be to ensure that Iran’s uranium enrichment would be capped
at something like 3.5 percent for civilian use and verified. And the reason
critics are saying that is a very bad sign is because they’re saying, why
shouldn’t the U.S.’s position be zero enrichment and the complete elimination of
the program?
SECSTATE RUBIO: Yeah. Well, I think Steve subsequently followed up by
clarifying that what he meant is that that would be the limit of what they would
be allowed to import for their domestic program. And they do that now. They do
have a nuclear reactor that imports Russian enriched material at 3.67, and
that’s what you need for -- but they don’t enrich it themselves. So I think what
Steve was -- the point he was trying to make in that interview, and has
subsequently clarified, was he’s talking about the level of enrichment that they
would be allowed -- the level of enriched material that they would be allowed to
import from outside, like multiple countries around the world do for their
peaceful civil nuclear programs.
QUESTION: If the United States wanted to take out Iran’s nuclear program with a
strike, does it have the capability to do so, or -- or is everything buried so
deep underground that there’s no guarantee?
SECSTATE RUBIO: Yeah, look, I think
logistically -- I probably don’t want to discuss all the logistics of it.
Suffice it to say that I do believe the United States has options, but we don’t
want to ever get to that. We really don’t. This is not --
QUESTION: Maybe we could -- maybe we could talk about it in a Signal group
together.
SECSTATE RUBIO: I’ll say this to you: I’ll
-- let me put it to you
this way, okay? We don’t want it to get to that point. We’re not at a stage now
where we’re going to be making threats or any things of this nature, because
honestly, this is not a president that ran on the promise of starting wars or
armed conflicts. We’ve gotten involved in this Houthi situation; it’s a favor to
the world that we’re doing, because these guys basically had shut down shipping
in the Red Sea. That needed to end. But this is not a president that’s looking
to start wars. He’s a president that’s looking to stop them and to prevent them.
That’s why we’ve been focused on Ukraine, that’s why we’re having these talks
with the Iranians.
I would tell everybody that this -- we’re a long ways away from any sort of
agreement with Iran. We recognize it’s difficult and hard. Oftentimes,
unfortunately, peace is. But we’re committed to achieving a peaceful outcome
that’s acceptable to everyone. It may not be possible; we don’t know. I don’t
even know if Iran knows how to make a deal. They’ve got their own internal
political dynamics in their country they have to work through. But we would want
to achieve a peaceful resolution to this and not resort to anything else, or
even speculate about it at this point.
QUESTION: Okay, just one last question and then I want to go to Russia and
Ukraine. Tucker Carlson has said that a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities --
now I’m quoting from him -- would “almost certainly result in thousands of
American deaths at bases throughout the Middle East, and cost the United
States…billions of dollars. Those aren’t guesses. Those are the Pentagon’s own
estimates. A bombing campaign against Iran will set off a war, and it will be
America’s war.” Is that true?
SECSTATE RUBIO: I think -- I -- here’s what I can say: Any military action at
this point in the Middle East, whether it’s against Iran by us or anybody else,
could in fact trigger a much broader conflict that will not be the sort of thing
that people have become accustomed to watching on television, which is, well, a
couple drones got shot down, but we took out a hundred fighters or whatever.
This’ll be more complex. I think we have to recognize -- and it’s important to be
honest about it -- Iran has taken -- both under sanctions and because of sanctions
relief under Obama, they have spent billions of dollars developing military
capabilities that we’re seeing, for example, being used in Ukraine right now
with drones and the like. Is the United States capable of defeating and
confronting all that? Absolutely we are. But I think it’s important to
understand it’s much more complex than it would have been 10 years ago or 5
years ago.
But that’s why we hope to avoid this. So when you hear people make the points
that they’ve made, it’s true. Any sort of armed conflict in the region is going
to be much messier than what people are used to seeing and that we would want.
And that’s why the President is so committed to the peaceful resolution -- the
prevention of an armed conflict in this scenario. Although he reserves every
right to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, he’d prefer peace. He has
said that repeatedly. And that’s why we want to end the war in Ukraine if that’s
possible.
QUESTION: Okay. So let’s talk about that. Is it possible? On Sunday, President
Trump said he hoped that Russia and Ukraine would make a deal this week. What
are the remaining obstacles to such a deal? Is there a chance that we could hear
about a deal by the end of the week, as Trump said?
SECSTATE RUBIO: Well, I don’t know about by the end of the week. I’m hopeful
that we can get to something quickly. And I remain hopeful that we can get
something done because this is a terrible war and it needs to end. Here’s --
because it has no military solution. There is no military solution to this war.
We have to be frank. Russia is not just going to roll over Ukraine and take the
whole country, and Ukraine’s not going to push them all the way back to where
they were before 2014. So what I would say we’re involved in is understanding
what is the Russian position -- we have a better understanding of that now
because we’ve actually spoken to them after three years of not speaking to them
-- what is the Ukrainian position, and figure out, are these guys even in the
same neighborhood? Because if they’re in completely different ZIP codes, then we
may have to conclude that they’re so far apart that peace is impossible at this
time.
We’ve done our best. We’ve put a lot of time and energy at the highest levels of
our government. We’ll continue to be willing to do so as long as there’s a
realistic path forward. If at some point we determine that we’re just too far
apart and not enough movement is happening, we may need to move on to other
priorities because there are a lot of important things happening in the world.
This is not our war. We didn’t start this war. We’re trying to help everybody
end it.
But they may be too far apart, but I hope not. We should be optimistic. We
should be willing, as we are, to do whatever it takes to bring the two sides
closer. And hopefully we can be successful. But ultimately, it’s not up to us.
It’s up to Russia and it’s up to Ukraine. They have to make the decision that
they’re willing to move closer to one another. And we need to start to see
progress.
QUESTION: A lot of Republicans and a lot of conservatives have become skeptical
of NATO as an institution. They question the outsized funding the U.S. provides,
whether or not it’s in our interest to remain in it. Why is NATO a good idea, if
you still think it’s a good idea? And what would you say to people in your party
that think NATO should be dissolved?
SECSTATE RUBIO: Well, I think there’s two separate issues involved. Is NATO a
good idea as a concept and as -- yeah, it is. I think alliances are always good.
To be able to enter into a defense alliance with advanced economies and advanced
militaries, it’s a force multiplier for the United States. So absolutely NATO is
in our interest.
Now, the question is what kind of NATO. It has to be a NATO in which your
partners are carrying their weight. And when you see a NATO where you have
countries that are spending 1 percent, 1.1 percent of their GDP, 1.2 percent,
then that’s really not an alliance. That’s a dependency. Now, to be fair, there
are other countries like Poland that are doing more than their fair share, and
there are other countries that frankly have not invested in their defense
capabilities for almost three decades.
So what the President’s point has been is he wants to be in NATO but a NATO
that’s real, a NATO that actually is strong, a NATO in which every partner is
contributing at scale, and we haven’t had that. Now, we’ve started to see
movement. We have. We’ve started to see more and more countries dedicate more
and more money to their -- to their defense thanks to the pressure that President
Trump has put on. And by the way, virtually every Republican president -- I’m
sorry -- virtually every American president in the last 25 years has complained
that NATO partners aren’t doing enough. Trump -- President Trump -- is the only
one that’s actually insisted on it in a way that’s actually gotten results.
So it’s on a good trajectory. So NATO is good as long as NATO is real, as long
as it’s a real defense alliance, not the United States and a bunch of junior
partners that aren’t doing their fair share.
QUESTION: One of the areas where it’s unclear to many people if it’s strategic
and a Trump sort of negotiating tactic or sincere is the question of tariffs.
And that’s because there have been sort of two messages coming out of the White
House. There’s the Peter Navarro school, which is basically tariffs are an end
in and of themselves; they’re a way to rebuild American industries that have
suffered from foreign competitions. And then the other view -- and this is more
the Treasury secretary -- is they’re strategic, they are a pressure position,
they are a way to extract meaningful concessions from other countries and get
them to move. Which is it?
SECSTATE RUBIO: I think it’s both, and I think both are legitimate. I think
there are some industries that are critical to the future of the United States
and we have to have a domestic capability. We have to be able to do things like
build ships. We have to be able to do things that are critical to our national
security, our pharmaceutical industry. And then there’s the broader question of
whether the state of current global trade is fair to the United States, and
unfortunately, across multiple administrations and presidents in both parties,
especially since 1991, we have allowed very dangerous trade imbalances to build
up.
As I travel around the world, in virtually every country I go to, you can’t find
an American car on the road. Many American products are not allowed in,
sometimes because of tariffs, sometimes because of non-tariff barriers, all
kinds of things they’ve put up. That just can’t continue. Maybe that made sense
50 years ago when these were poor developing countries that we hoped wouldn’t
fall into the Soviet orbit, but now these are advanced economies. The EU -- if
you take the EU holistically, its economy is the same as the United States.
These are advanced economies. Why would there be such a massive trade imbalance
between two advanced economies, the EU and the United States? That’s not
sustainable. That needs to be recalibrated and has to be fixed.
In the case of the Chinese, it’s an export-driven economy. They can sell and
export whatever they want into the U.S., but they severely restrict what we can
send them. That’s not sustainable. That has to be confronted. And we don’t have
10 years to figure this out now. We have like one, two, or three years to figure
it out.
So I think it’s a combination of both industries that we need in our country and
need to be protected but also the broader issue of resetting the baseline for
global trade in a way that’s sustainable to the national interests of the United
States.
QUESTION: The Treasury Secretary reportedly told investors at this closed-door
JP Morgan summit today -- and I’m quoting from him -- “There will be a
de-escalation” -- and then I’m reading -- “in President Trump’s trade war with
China in the very near future.” And then he added this: “No one thinks the
current status quo is sustainable.”
So what can we expect next?
SECSTATE RUBIO: Well, I can’t answer for what he said. I wasn’t in that meeting
and I certainly don’t speak -- it’s not -- the State Department is not running the
tariff negotiations. I will say this: As far as people are talking about the
price that tariffs are going to have on the U.S. economy, it’s also having a
tremendous price on the Chinese economy. That’s an export-driven economy. Their
entire economy is built not on consumption domestically but on what they can
overproduce and dump onto economies all over the world -- all over the world, not
-- I mean, the Europeans had to stop them from selling electric cars because they
were going to wipe out the European electric car industry. So I think China is
paying a heavy price.
So I would say without commenting on what the Secretary of Treasury said that,
yeah, there’s vulnerability to the Chinese side as well, but at some point this
issue had to brought to a head because the trade imbalance and the unfairness
that exists between the Chinese and the United States is simply unsustainable.
It’s more than unsustainable. It’s dangerous. It’s geopolitically dangerous and
it needed to be confronted, and we can’t wait any longer to do it. We’ve allowed
this to go on for 25 years and it cannot continue, or we’re going to wind up
living in a world in which we depend on China for everything critical to our
security and to our prosperity, and that’s not a world that we intend to leave
for our children and grandchildren.
QUESTION: Is China the number one defense priority that America faces?
SECSTATE RUBIO: I think China is the number one challenge on every front that I
can imagine -- geopolitically, national security, economically, industrially. And
look, the President says this all the time and I agree: We don’t blame the
Chinese. The Chinese have done what we would have done if we were the leaders of
China. They looked -- we -- the previous leaders in this country and around the
world allowed them to cheat and steal and get these unfair advantages, and they
took them. Why wouldn’t they? But now it’s got to be fixed. It’s got to be
fixed.
QUESTION: Let’s look just objectively at where we stand versus China. The U.S.
Navy is the smallest it has been since World War I. Our Army is the smallest it
has been since World War II. Our Air Force is smaller and older than it used to
be. And meanwhile, China has the world’s largest army and the world’s largest
navy. They build more ships in a month -- I think this will shock people -- than
we do in a year. And meantime, we are cutting defense spending.
What are we doing to prepare for a possible war with China?
SECSTATE RUBIO: Well, what we’re --
QUESTION: And if one came, could we win it?
SECSTATE RUBIO: What we want to do is prevent a war from China by being strong
enough to make them understand that they could never win a war against the
United States. A war against China would be a terrible thing.
QUESTION: I know. But if they look --
SECSTATE RUBIO: And the best way to
prevent it --
QUESTION: But if I’m China and I’m looking
at that reality --
SECSTATE RUBIO: Absolutely.
QUESTION: -- I’m thinking, I could win this.
SECSTATE RUBIO: And that’s how -- that’s why it’s dangerous, because China is
undertaking the fastest, most rapid, most expansive peacetime military buildup
in the history of the world -- not in modern history, in the history of the
world. Meanwhile, the United States has lagged behind for a variety of different
reasons.
You talked about the Navy as an example. We don’t have a shipbuilding industry.
We have some shipbuilding in the United States but not nearly at the scale the
Chinese do. It’s not just that we’re not spending the money on it; it’s we don’t
have the ability to do it because we allowed the nation to be deindustrialized.
We allowed the United States to become deindustrialized, especially since 1991
with both free trade agreements and the cheating that we allowed when we assumed
the -- allowed China to ascend to the World Trade Organization.
And what it has done is deindustrialized us. We can’t just build ships. Boeing
struggles to build planes. We can’t make pharmaceuticals. We depend on China for
88 percent of all the active ingredients in most of the pharmaceuticals that we
rely on in our country. You can go down issue after issue after issue and you
can see that it’s not just that we’re not spending money on it; it’s that we
can’t do it because the industries that would produce it domestically are long
gone. They were outsourced, they were sent somewhere else -- not just to China
but other places, but primarily to China. That’s dangerous. It cannot continue.
QUESTION: In your Senate confirmation hearing you talked about how, “The
post-war global order is not just obsolete, it is a weapon being used against
us,” and that right now we are being “called to create a free world out of the
chaos.” And I think a lot of people have different explanations, clearly, about
how we got to a place where the post-war global order is obsolete, but everyone
is seeing the reality of that and I think feeling a lot of anxiety and concern
from many different points along the political spectrum about what is going to
replace it. And I think some people are feeling that the U.S. has almost
accepted a declinist position and we’re now in a kind of managed decline.
So I’ve wanted for a while to ask you two questions: Are we in decline, and is
the role of our leadership to manage it as best as they can? And the second is:
What comes next? What is the new global order going to look like and what are
some of the parameters of the American position inside of it?
SECSTATE RUBIO: Well, the only reason why the U.S. would ever be in decline is
if we made bad decisions and continued to allow them to perpetuate. I think the
road we were on under Joe Biden and previous administrations before that put us
on a road to decline. I think what the President -- President Trump is doing now
is addressing the causes of it. You talk about the post-war -- post-Cold War era
and why it’s bad. That post-Cold War era basically said free trade is important
above everything else. We’ve now recognized that there are industries critical
to a country and its national security and national interests that you have to
be able to have domestically, you can’t rely on foreign sources for, and that’s
why we’re addressing that in the trade space. I think we realized that mass
migration is not something that we can just tolerate. It undermines your
country, it undermines your security, and that had to be addressed.
I think you look at our alliances around the world, and I get it -- you’re a
country that has this vast social safety network that you have high taxes to pay
for and you’re spending very little on your national security because America’s
got your back. That can’t be sustained. We can’t continue to engage in that way.
That has to be corrected. We talked about NATO a moment ago.
You think about all these conflicts going on in the world -- we have to
prioritize them. I think if we become a country that spreads itself too thin,
that basically is trying to go 100 percent all in on five major conflicts around
the planet, you begin to exhaust, overreach, and overextend yourself, even for
the most powerful country in the world. So I think we’re beginning to address
that as -- all of these challenges that could lead to American decline not
because somebody else but because of the things we failed to do, and that
includes rebuild our industrial capabilities here at home.
One final point I would make is we are entering an era in which our foreign
policy has to be more focused, more pragmatic, and more balanced, and that is
that we have to clearly define what is our national interest, remember what the
issue is, and then we have to pursue that. And that means balancing things that
in the past weren’t balanced. In the past it was democracy promotion at any cost
or human rights promotion at any cost. We’re not abandoning democracy, we’re not
abandoning human rights; we’re just saying that has to be part of the overall
analysis when we decide where to spend our time and what to spend our money on.
QUESTION: Secretary Rubio, the poem on the Statue of Liberty, the Emma Lazarus
poem -- “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe
free” -- is that still true?
SECSTATE RUBIO: Yeah, and there’s laws that allow people to come here every
day. The United States -- every year on average about a million people legally
enter the United States on a green card and five -- three to five years later can
become United States citizens. We remain, despite all the specter out there, the
most generous country in the world in terms of allowing people to come to the
United States. All we’re asking is that they do it through a process. All we’re
asking is that they -- even the most generous charities in the United States
generally require people that show up for help to fill out a paper and wait in
line and sort of have their case evaluated.
So we’re not a charity, but when it comes to our immigration policies, no
country in the world allows as many people to come in. We just ask people to do
it legally through an appropriate process. What we can’t be is a country where
you can just show up at the border and say I’m here and I’m here to stay, no
questions asked. That’s lunacy.
QUESTION: Secretary of State Marco Rubio, thank you so much for the time. I
really appreciate it.
