Opinion | Facing the reality of Marco Rubio as Secretary of State

By Tom Fowdy

On Tuesday the New York Times reported that Donald Trump was expected to appoint US Senator Marco Rubio as his Secretary of State.

The reaction has been, explosive. Foreign policy hawks and China bashers are celebrating, while pro-China voices are licking their wounds in despair. After cheering just days ago that Trump would not be appointing Mike Pompeo and Nikki Haley into his Presidential administration, he goes and appoints the man who is known as one of the most NeoConservative of all senators to lead his foreign policy who would typically introduce new bills against China every single month.

I will note however, he did suddenly flip his views on China just days after the election to refer to "getting along" with China and merely citing differences on trade, an unusual deviation from his endless call for a cold war, as well as also calling for an end to the war in Ukraine, perhaps he knew he was about to be appointed, but it will be hardly reassuring for most, for a Marco Rubio Secretary of State absolutely guarantees a very aggressive foreign policy.

First, a Rubio state department means the new Trump administration will escalate on a number of fronts before we even get to the China question. In particular, Rubio will take a very hard line against Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. The US will be back in the business of actively promoting regime change in Latin America, a policy the Biden administration dropped. Second, on the China issue, Marco Rubio will actively seek for Central and South American countries to follow America's policy preferences and will surely engage in diplomacy with the view to shutting Beijing out.

Second, we should expect things in the Middle East to get worse, not better. Marco Rubio is an ardent supporter of Israel and a hardline opponent of Iran who opposed the JCPOA deal with Tehran militantly. Benjamin Netanyahu has already calculated he will have even more of a free reign with the Trump administration which is why he fired his Secretary of Defense and held off against any peace overtures. If you thought Biden was bad in his unconditional support of Israel, you will have seen nothing yet. Rubio will likely continue the previous Trump administration's position of pushing states in the Middle East to recognize Israel as part of the Abraham Accords.

Third, it seems Marco Rubio will adopt the "MAGA" line of wanting to get out of Ukraine, seeing it as contrary to American objectives and national interests to remain in the war. However, we should be cautious and make no precise predictions on what form this could take. Trump is infamously erratic and he could effectively "escalate to de-escalate," especially as his advisor for National Security, Mike Waltz, has also called for the removal of American weapons restrictions. We should assume that the Trump administration's overarching priority will be to resolve the war, similar to how he tackled North Korea first in 2017, but again the situation is far too complicated to conceive how, or if they can succeed in doing this readily.

One thing NeoConservatives and China bashers are happy about is that a Rubio state department will evidently continue to support Taiwan and thus the militarisation of the Pacific region against China. It was absolutely foolish to overexaggerate a Trump presidency's isolationist tendencies, as I have said multiple times, and the idea of course he would "trade" Taiwan in is probably only wishful thinking at best. However, I maintain my new thesis that with such neo-conservatives at the helm, China's goal to respond to this should be to play a more calculated game to try and contain their influence wherever possible rather than creating conflict and crises that ultimately enable them.

Rubio after all has his own agenda, it is very strong and well known, but he is answerable to Trump in the end, as was Mike Pompeo, and it is how one shapes the power dynamics within the administration that determines who gets the upper hand, with things not falling off a cliff against China until the pandemic. So, the key is to allow Trump to claim political victories for himself that reap dividends he can sell to America, no matter how ludicrous they may be, then engage in a conflict. I despise the NeoConservatives of Washington more than anything else, but experience has taught me that you cannot fight fire with fire, nor does pouring petrol on it work. Instead, you fight a fire by starving it and you do not give your political opponents an inch to pounce on you. Of course that is easier said than done when the US machine manufactures consent in the form of propaganda against you to justify hostile policies, but you get the point.

The author is a well-seasoned writer and analyst with a large portfolio related to China topics, especially in the field of politics, international relations and more. He graduated with an Msc. in Chinese Studies from Oxford University in 2018.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.

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