At a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Wednesday, Sec. Marco Rubio was protested while delivering his opening remarks.
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00:00I'm proud to recognize Secretary Rubio for any opening statement that you may have.
00:03Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity to speak to you today.
00:06I'll try to stay under the five minutes so we can get time for questions here.
00:11So when I took this job, and I said this to you in my confirmation hearing,
00:14the most important thing we need to do is return American foreign policy
00:17to be centered on our national interests.
00:19For far too long, that had been lost as a concept of foreign policy.
00:23In essence, in many cases, oftentimes the U.S. engaged in the world
00:26on the basis of what was good for the global order or the international community
00:29and what like.
00:30And look, for about 30 years, that made a lot of sense
00:32until the end of the post-Cold War era.
00:47So that made a lot of sense for a long period of time during the Cold War.
00:51But then we entered the post-Cold War era.
00:53And the world order has rapidly changed.
00:56We entered a new era about 12 or 14 years ago,
00:58and we entered an era of near-peer competition,
01:01where for the first time since the end of the Cold War,
01:03the United States had a near-peer competitor and adversary in the state of China.
01:07And we need to confront that.
01:09And our foreign policy needs to be geared around that
01:11and on the realities of this new world.
01:13And so what that means is we have to have a State Department
01:15that can deliver on a foreign policy
01:17that is rooted in the national interest of the United States.
01:20To defend the national interest of the United States requires us,
01:23number one, to make sure that every dollar we spend
01:25and every action we take has to have measurable outcomes
01:28that deliver for the American people.
01:30They have to either make our country safer
01:32or they have to make our country stronger
01:34or they have to help make our country more prosperous.
01:37It has to do at least one of those three things.
01:39And ideally, whether it's a program or a measure that we take,
01:42it should do all three of them.
01:44Now, what that means is that there are some great causes in the world.
01:47There really are.
01:47There are some great causes.
01:48There are some horrifying things that are happening on the planet.
01:51America cannot solve every single one of them.
01:54What we need to focus on is prioritizing our foreign policy
01:57to those areas that are in our national interest.
02:01Now, we will still remain the largest contributor of foreign aid
02:04and humanitarian assistance on this planet by far.
02:07The United States, even under the budget that's before you today
02:09and the changes we have made,
02:11will still contribute more in foreign aid
02:13than the next 10 countries combined.
02:16Then the entire OECD, the next closest country,
02:19is not China, it's Germany, and it's way behind us, even now.
02:23But that foreign aid has to be geared
02:24towards our foreign, to our national interest.
02:27We need to design a State Department that delivers on that.
02:30Yes, we canceled a bunch of contracts in USAID.
02:33Some were stupid and outrageous.
02:35Others didn't serve the national interest.
02:37And others we kept.
02:38And we are folding it under the Department of State.
02:40And you know why?
02:41Because we want it to be part of the toolbox of foreign policy,
02:46not a standalone.
02:46It is not charity.
02:48Foreign aid is not charity.
02:50It is designed to further the national interest of the United States.
02:53So we will do humanitarian assistance.
02:55We will do food assistance.
02:56We will do developmental assistance.
02:58And we will do security assistance.
03:00But we will do it driven by our embassies and our regional bureaus.
03:04Because what those issues mean look very different in Guatemala
03:07than they may in Chad or in Kenya or in some other part of the world, in the Indo-Pacific.
03:14And so one of the things that we have tried to do in our reorganization,
03:17it drive power and influence on policy making and decision making
03:21to the regional bureaus and ultimately to our embassies.
03:24Our embassies, our ambassadors, are the front line of American foreign policy.
03:28The most important thing I do every single day is not read memos, it's read cables.
03:33Every night I get 10, 15 select cables from stations around the world, different embassies.
03:37The best ideas in that building come from the ground up from our embassies.
03:43Now I want to tell you something else.
03:44Look, I did serve in the Senate for a long time, so this is a new job to me.
03:47When I got there, I'd get a memo.
03:48I still get these memos.
03:49I should have brought one today.
03:50In order for an idea to reach me, a decision to reach the Secretary of State,
03:55some of these things have to be checked off by 40 people, 40 boxes.
04:00And if any one of these people has a question, they can hold it up
04:03before the idea even ever gets to me.
04:06Now that sounds like a crazy thing to begin with.
04:09We can't afford it in the 21st century.
04:10We have to be able to move very quickly.
04:12And a case in point is what happened last week.
04:15Syria, under a new authority, granted people with some checkered background,
04:19is on the verge of collapse potentially.
04:22And if it collapses, it will devolve into civil war.
04:26And civil war will mean that it will become a playground for ISIS and other jihadists,
04:30not to mention Iranian influence coming back in.
04:33So there's no guarantee that by outreach and working with the transitional authority in Syria,
04:37things are going to work out.
04:38It may work out.
04:39It may not work out.
04:40But if we don't reach out and try, it's guaranteed to not work out.
04:45And so we had to move very quickly to action that.
04:47If we had not done sanctions relief last week, and now the EU has followed suit,
04:52then our partners in the region could not have provided donor dollars
04:57so that that transitional authority could try to stabilize its governance of the country,
05:01that place could have collapsed within weeks and become an ISIS playground once again.
05:04There is no way that a traditional system could have delivered on that.
05:08It would have gone to the interagency.
05:09It would have gone to six to nine months of debate.
05:11Any individual could have held it up with an information hold,
05:15and we never would have acted.
05:17We can't afford it.
05:18The world moves too quickly.
05:20And so we need to drive policy from the ground up,
05:22from our embassies and our regional bureaus,
05:24and that's what we're doing.
05:25And that's what we're doing.
05:26On the last point I would make about foreign aid,
05:29foreign aid has to be part of our portfolio,
05:31part of what we do,
05:32and it has to be consistent with our agenda in any region of the world or any country.
05:36And oftentimes you will find,
05:38and maybe some of you have found when you travel,
05:40you go talk to an ambassador,
05:41and they will tell you what USAID was pushing
05:43and what they are pushing in the country are not just different,
05:46they're in contradiction.
05:48And in many cases, USAID programs were undermining the mission of the embassy.
05:53That's a fact.
05:53And I heard that over and over again.
05:55I've heard it in the Caribbean basin,
05:56and I've heard it in other parts of the world.
05:58I am not the first secretary of state
06:00that wanted USAID and foreign aid to be under the Department of State.
06:04I'm just the first that's been able to do it.
06:05And I'm glad we've done it,
06:07and it will deliver better foreign policy
06:08and, frankly, more accountability
06:10and more oversight opportunities for your committee down the road.