President-elect Donald Trump‘s nominee to head the State Department, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), believes the 21st century will be defined by the competition and possible conflict between the United States and China.
At his Tuesday hearing with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the Florida Republican dismissed Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Islamic regime of Iran as important but ultimately secondary adversaries in the fight for continued U.S. hegemony.
“The Communist Party of China is the most potent and dangerous near-peer adversary this country has ever confronted,” Rubio told the committee.
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Rubio blamed naive optimism among globalists and the “citizens of the world” mentality of the postwar consensus for the ascension of the Chinese Communist Party to the world stage.
The senator recounted how, in his mind, the U.S. allowed the CCP to exploit global institutions and regulatory bodies to bolster its economic position — particularly by convincing its rival powers to classify it as a “developing country.”
That designation has historically allowed China to circumvent or ignore international responsibilities, such as ecological standards and worker rights protections, that first-world economies must deal with.
“Instead of folding into the post-Cold War global order, they have manipulated it to serve their interest at the expense of ours,” Rubio said in his opening testimony. “We welcomed the Chinese Communist Party into this global order. And they took advantage of all its benefits.”
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“But they ignored all its obligations and responsibilities. Instead, they have lied, cheated, hacked, and stolen their way to global superpower status at our expense,” he continued.
Rubio emphasized that the majority of actions necessary to push back on China’s growing power can be done domestically.
He told the committee that “much of what we need to do to confront China is here at home,” such as commitment to “rebuild our domestic industrial capacity.”
In Rubio’s estimation, the public could “depend on China” for “much of what matters to us, from our security to our health,” if the State Department and wider U.S. government do not change course in the next 10 years.
“The Chinese believe the United States are in an inevitable decline and they are on an inevitable rise,” he warned.
Rubio was additionally grilled on his commitment to the island of Taiwan, a functionally autonomous territory that is not recognized as sovereign by the People’s Republic of China.
The CCP has made the reclamation of control over Taiwan a key goal of the decade.
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“This is a foundational and definitional issue for Xi Jinping personally,” Rubio warned. “Unless something changes dramatically … we are going to have to deal with this before the end of this decade.”
Rubio advocated taking a “porcupine strategy” in supporting Taiwan — flooding the island with defense technology and national security infrastructure that would make sure the “price would be too high to pay” for an armed invasion.