Secretary of State Marco Rubio entered the State Department on Tuesday for the first time in his term. new jobtaking the reins of the main agency responsible for American foreign policy at a time of violent global crises and as other countries begin to engage with President Trump.
After greeting employees in a ceremony, Mr. Rubio headed to a meeting with his counterparts from India, Japan and Australia to discuss issues in the Indo-Pacific region, an area that, at in his eyes, China seeks to dominate.
The State Department and the United States Agency for International Development, which operates under Mr. Rubio, began suspending foreign aid payments, following an executive order signed Monday by Mr. Trump.
This decision immediately affects programs aimed at relieving hunger, disease and wartime suffering around the world, as well as those that help countries develop economically.
Mr. Rubio was sworn in as secretary of state at 9:30 a.m. on a frigid Tuesday morning by Vice President JD Vance. He arrived at the State Department’s flag-draped lobby at 1 p.m. to applause, as hundreds of employees strained to catch a glimpse of him and his wife, Jeanette Rubio, and their four children. Lisa Kenna, a career diplomat who serves as Mr. Rubio’s executive secretary, as she did for Mike Pompeo in the first Trump administration, introduced the new secretary.
Mr. Rubio thanked the many diplomats working abroad, then outlined Mr. Trump’s foreign policy goal: “That mission is to ensure that our foreign policy is focused on one thing, and that is promoting our national interests, which they clearly did. defined through his campaign as anything that makes us stronger, safer or more prosperous,” he said.
“There will be changes, but those changes are not meant to be destructive, they are not meant to be punitive,” he added.
He said “things are moving faster than ever” in the world and the ministry needed to act “at the right speed”.
“We have to move faster than ever because the world is changing faster than ever,” he said, “and we have to have a vision that some say is called ‘looking around the corner,’ but we have to let’s really think about where we will be in five, seven, 10 or 15 years.
This analysis of a troubled world and the challenges facing American foreign policy intersects with concerns expressed by Mr. Rubio’s predecessor, Antony J. Blinken, in several of his last public interviews.
“We’re all getting this intravenous flow of information, and we’re getting new information every millisecond, and the pressure to just react is more intense than it’s ever been,” Mr. Blinken said in an interview on the 14th. January with David Remnick, the editor-in-chief of the New Yorker. “And no one has the distance, the buffer, to really try to think and think before they act. At least it’s definitely a lot harder to do. The speed with which things happen is much more difficult. »
Mr. Rubio also sent a cable describing his vision to department employees in more direct language than he used in his public appearance. Since the end of the Cold War, he writes, leaders of the Democratic and Republican parties have been guilty of “emphasizing ideology over common sense,” but that will change now.
He said that “mass migration is the most important problem of our time” and that the ministry would no longer take measures that would “facilitate or encourage it.” Diplomacy, particularly in the Western Hemisphere, would “prioritize the security of America’s borders,” he said.
He also said the ministry would end practices aimed at increasing diversity in the workforce and that diplomats would no longer promote “political and cultural causes that are divisive in the country and deeply unpopular at home.” ‘stranger “. In addition, he said, the ministry would terminate all programs which “open the door to censorship” of other Americans.
The meeting at State Department headquarters Tuesday afternoon between Mr. Rubio and the top diplomats of Asian countries, who form a nonmilitary coalition known as Quadhad been scheduled some time after the three foreign ministers accepted invitations from Mr. Trump’s aides to attend Monday’s inauguration. Mr. Rubio held bilateral meetings with each of the foreign ministers after the Quad talks. Japanese officials later told reporters they hoped their prime minister would meet Mr Trump in Washington by March.
Mr. Rubio was the first cabinet secretary appointed by Mr. Trump to be confirmed. He represented Florida in the Senate since 2011 and served on the Foreign Relations and Intelligence committees. It was unanimously approved by the Senate on Monday evening.
Mr. Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, has been particularly outspoken about the need to confront the Chinese Communist Party.
Mr. Trump’s executive order on foreign aid is the presidential directive that has had the most immediate effect on the operations of the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID. On Monday, Mr. Trump signed an order suspend any disbursement of foreign assistance funds and designation of new funds pending a 90-day review in accordance with guidance to be issued by the Secretary of State.
This means that hundreds of millions of dollars that would usually go to supporting programs on every continent – programs that provide basic daily sustenance for many people – are frozen.
Nongovernmental groups and entrepreneurs who have used the money to fund programs are scrambling to figure out what to do, and many programs in impoverished, war-stricken or disaster-stricken parts of the world could suddenly end, said an American official.
The executive order specifies that the 90-day evaluation will focus on “program effectiveness and consistency with United States foreign policy.”
“The U.S. foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests and, in many cases, contrary to American values,” he said. “They serve to destabilize world peace by promoting ideas in foreign countries that are directly contrary to harmonious and stable relations within and between countries. »
