Secretary of State Marco Rubio walked into the State Department on Tuesday for the first time in his new job, taking the reins of the main agency carrying out U.S. foreign policy at a time of violent global crises and as other nations begin engaging with President Trump.
After greeting employees at a ceremonial gathering, Mr. Rubio went into a meeting with his counterparts from India, Japan and Australia to discuss issues in the Indo-Pacific region, an area that, in his eyes, China seeks to dominate.
Mr. Rubio was sworn in as secretary of state at 9:30 on a frigid Tuesday morning by Vice President JD Vance. He arrived at the flag-festooned entrance hall of the State Department at 1 p.m. to applause, as hundreds of employees strained to get a glimpse of him and his wife, Jeanette Rubio, and their four children. Lisa Kenna, a career diplomat who is serving 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 working overseas, then laid out Mr. Trump’s foreign policy goal: “That mission is to ensure that our foreign policy is centered on one thing, and that is the advancement of our national interests,” he said.
“There will be changes, but the changes are not meant to be destructive, they’re not meant to be punitive,” he added.
He said that “things are moving faster than ever” around the world, and that the department had to be quick to act and react.
The meeting among the top diplomats from the four nations, which form a nonmilitary coalition known as the Quad, had been scheduled before the transition from the Biden to the Trump administrations on Monday. Mr. Rubio was scheduled to have bilateral meetings with each of the foreign ministers after the initial Quad talks.
Mr. Rubio was the first cabinet secretary named by Mr. Trump to be confirmed. He had been in the Senate representing Florida since 2011 and served on the Foreign Relations and Intelligence Committees. He was unanimously approved by the Senate on Monday evening.
Mr. Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, has been especially outspoken on China and on the need for the United States to confront the Chinese Communist Party on a wide range of issues.
Some of Mr. Trump’s executive orders are already affecting operations at the State Department and at the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID. On Monday, Mr. Trump signed an order to halt any disbursement of foreign aid funds and designation of new funds pending a 90-day review under guidelines to be issued by the secretary of state.
Nongovernmental groups and contractors who have been using the money to work on programs are scrambling to figure out what to do, and many programs in impoverished and war- or disaster-stricken parts of the world could suddenly end, a U.S. official said.
The executive order said the 90-day assessment would look at “programmatic efficiencies and consistency with United States foreign policy.”
“The United States foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values,” it said. “They serve to destabilize world peace by promoting ideas in foreign countries that are directly inverse to harmonious and stable relations internal to and among countries.”
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