Secretary Rubio Testimony to Senate on State, Syria, & China
Today, Secretary of State (and fellow Floridian) Marco Rubio briefed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on his proposed reorganization of the Department of State. There were a few sections of particular relevance to this newsletter and the topics we discuss. More specifically, Rubio’s comments on the U.S. approach to Syria moving forward, as well as his views on aid as a means to compete with China are worth noting.
Rubio on Syria:
“The goal is to drive power and action in our agency to the regional bureaus and to our embassies. On everything we do, we want our foreign policy to be holistic. So, for example, we recognize that the set of factors both in diplomacy and foreign aid in Guatemala or in Trinidad or in Jamaica are going to look different than they may somewhere in Africa, somewhere in the Indo-Pacific region. And we want those decisions, and the influence over those decisions to be made, to be driven to the regional bureaus. And so what we’ve done is we’ve taken a lot of the functional bureaus and functional processes and moved them under the purview of the regional bureaus and the career individuals that serve there and ultimately down to the embassy.
One of our first tests, Senator Shaheen, is going to be in Syria. We don’t have an embassy in Syria. It’s operating out of Türkiye. But we need to help them. We want to help that government succeed because the alternative is full-scale civil war and chaos, which would of course destabilize the entire region. And we are going to allow our people on the ground – both our embassy personnel at the Damascus embassy located in Türkiye and, for the short period of time, at least during the interim, our ambassador in Türkiye – to work with local officials there to make determinations about what kind of aid they need. Is it humanitarian? Is it improving law enforcement or governance functions? We think it’s going to be the first test of this new model, but I strongly believe that our decisions and the power to drive decisions and the decisions and the inputs that we’re taking have to be driven in many cases from the bottom up, not from the top down, and focused on the fact that there is unique sets of factors in individual parts of the world that require different priorities and attention.
And ultimately, foreign policy – mature foreign policy – requires a balancing of interests. That’s just a fact, okay? Our human rights agenda is going to look different in certain parts of the world than it will in others. That doesn’t mean that we as a people have abandoned it. That means that in a world where you need to conduct real foreign policy in a mature and structured way, there are ways you’re going to have to balance all these.”
Rubio on China
“I will say this: Even with the reforms we’ve put in place and what we’re suggesting as changes to our foreign aid, we still will provide more foreign aid, more humanitarian support than the next 10 countries combined, than the entire OECD, and far more than China. China doesn’t do humanitarian aid. China does predatory lending. That’s what Belt and Road Initiative is. That’s what all of their aid – they have no – zero record of doing humanitarian aid in the world, and frankly, they don’t know how to do it. They have no interest in doing it. What they’re very good at is going into some country, making you a loan, and then holding that debt over your head. And that’s what they continue to do, and by the way, you have to hire a Chinese company to do it.
So I don’t agree with this assessment that – there’s no evidence whatsoever that China has either the capacity or the will to replace the U.S. in humanitarian assistance, in food deliveries, or in developmental assistance, for that matter. We provide development assistance. They provide debt traps, and that’s a point over and over again around the world that we’ve made, and we’ve found receptive audiences to it.”
You can read more on China’s humanitarianism in the Middle East.