Secretary of State Marco Rubio entered the State Department on Tuesday for the first time in his new post, taking the reins of the main agency implementing U.S. foreign policy at a time of violent global crises and as other countries begin to grapple with President Trump.
After welcoming staff to a celebratory gathering, Mr. Rubio went to a meeting with his counterparts from India, Japan and Australia to discuss issues in the Indo-Pacific region, a region that, in his view, China seeks to control.
The State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, working under Mr. Rubio’s authority, began halting the disbursement of foreign aid funds, following an executive order signed by Mr. Trump on Monday.
The move immediately affects programs aimed at alleviating hunger, disease and wartime suffering around the world, as well as programs that assist countries with economic development.
Mr. Rubio was sworn in as Secretary of State at 9:30 a.m. on a frigid Tuesday morning before Vice President J.D. Vance. He arrived at the State Department’s flag-lined entrance hall at 1 p.m. to applause, as hundreds of staff strained to catch a glimpse of him, his wife, Janet Rubio, and their four children. Lisa Keena, 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 serving abroad, then laid out Mr. Trump’s foreign policy goal: “This mission is to make sure that our foreign policy is focused on one thing, which is advancing our national interests, which is what they’ve clearly focused on.” “It was defined by his campaign as anything that makes us stronger, safer or more prosperous,” he said.
He added: “There will be changes, but the changes are not meant to be destructive, and they are not meant to be punitive.”
He said that “things are moving faster than ever” around the world, and that the administration must act “with the appropriate speed.”
“We need to move faster than ever before because the world is changing faster than ever before, and we have to have a perspective that some say is called ‘look around the corner,’ but we really need to get moving,” he said. Think about where we will be in five, seven, ten or 15 years.”
This analysis of the turbulent world and challenges facing American foreign policy overlaps with concerns expressed by Mr. Rubio’s predecessor, Antony Blinken, in several of his recent public interviews.
“We all have this infusion of information, we’re getting new inputs every millisecond, and the pressure to respond is simply more intense than ever,” Mr. Blinken said in a January 14 interview with David Remnick. New Yorker editor. “And no one has the distance, or the buffer, to try and think before they act. At least it is much more difficult to do so. The speed at which things happen is much more difficult.”
Mr. Rubio also sent a telegram outlining his vision to department staff in harsher language than he has used in his public appearances. Since the end of the Cold War, he wrote, Democratic and Republican party leaders have been guilty of “emphasizing ideology over common sense,” but that may now change.
“Mass migration is the most important issue of our time,” he said, and the department will no longer take actions that would “facilitate or encourage” it. Diplomacy, especially in the Western Hemisphere, will “prioritize securing America’s borders,” he said.
He also said the department would end practices aimed at increasing diversity in the workforce, and diplomats would no longer promote “political and cultural issues that are divisive at home and deeply unpopular abroad.” He also said the section It will terminate any programs Which “opens the door to censorship” of other Americans.
The meeting at State Department headquarters on Tuesday afternoon between Mr. Rubio and senior diplomats from Asian countries, which form a non-military alliance known as the Quad, was scheduled for sometime after the three secretaries of state accepted invitations from aides to Mr. Trump. Attend the opening ceremony on Monday. Mr. Rubio held bilateral meetings with each of the foreign ministers after the quadripartite talks. Japanese officials told reporters afterward that they hoped to have their prime minister meet with Mr. Trump in Washington by March.
Mr. Rubio was the first Cabinet secretary appointed by Mr. Trump to be confirmed. He has been a senator representing Florida since 2011 and has served on the Foreign Relations and Intelligence committees. The Senate approved it unanimously on Monday evening.
Mr. Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, has been particularly vocal 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 impact on operations at the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID. Monday, Mr. Trump I signed an order Halt any disbursement of foreign aid funds and allocate new funds pending a 90-day review under guidelines to be issued by the Secretary of State.
This means that hundreds of millions of dollars that would normally have gone to support programs across the continents – programs that provide essential daily support to many people – have been frozen.
A US official said that non-governmental organizations and contractors who use the money in the programs are scrambling to figure out what to do, and many programs in poor areas that suffer from wars or disasters in the world may suddenly end.
The 90-day evaluation will look at “programmatic efficiencies and consistency with United States foreign policy,” the executive order said.
“The US foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are out of step with American interests and, in many cases, inconsistent with American values,” she said. “It is destabilizing world peace by promoting ideas in foreign countries that are in direct conflict with internal harmonious and stable relations between and among countries.”