Rubio Oversees Freezing Foreign Aid and Meets Asian Diplomats on Day 1

Secretary of State Marco Rubio entered the State Department for the first time on Tuesday new jobtook the reins of the main agency that conducts US foreign policy during times of severe global crises and when other nations began to engage with President Trump.

After greeting workers at a ceremonial gathering, Mr. Rubio went on to meet with counterparts from India, Japan and Australia to discuss issues in the Indo-Pacific region, which he sees as China’s bid to dominate.

The State Department and the United States Agency for International Development, which Mr. Rubio oversees, began suspending foreign aid after Mr. Trump signed an executive order on Monday.

The move has an immediate impact on programs aimed at alleviating the suffering of hunger, disease and war around the world, as well as programs that help countries with economic development.

Mr. Rubio was sworn in as secretary of state by Vice President JD Vance at 9:30 a.m. on a frosty Tuesday morning. He arrived at the State Department’s flag-draped entrance hall at 1 a.m. to cheers, as hundreds of workers strained to catch a glimpse of him, his wife, Jeanette Rubio, and their four children. Lisa Kenna, a career diplomat who served as Mr. Rubio’s executive secretary, introduced the new secretary, as she did for Mike Pompeo in the first Trump administration.

Mr. Rubio thanked the many diplomats working abroad and then outlined Mr. Trump’s foreign policy objective: “This mission is to ensure that our foreign policy is focused on one thing, and that is the advancement of our national interest, which they clearly have. defined through his campaign as anything that makes us stronger, safer or more prosperous,” he said.

“There will be changes, but the changes are not meant to be disruptive, they are not meant to be punitive,” he said.

He said that “things are moving faster than ever” in the world and the department needs to move “with appropriate speed”.

“We need to move faster than ever because the world is changing faster than we are,” he said, “and we need to have what some say is a ‘look around the corner’ mindset, but what we really need is five, seven, 10 or 15 years from now. think where we will be.

This analysis of a troubled world and problems in American foreign policy echo concerns expressed by Mr. Rubio’s predecessor, Antony J. Blinken, in recent public interviews.

“We all have an intravenous flow of information, and we’re getting new information every millisecond, and the pressure to just react is stronger than ever,” Mr. Blinken said in a Jan. 14 interview with David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker. “And no one has the distance, the buffer, to really think and think before they act. At least it’s really hard to do. The speed of things is more difficult.”

Mr. Rubio also sent a cable to department staff outlining his views.

A meeting between senior diplomats from Asian countries, known as the Non-Military Coalition, was held at State Department headquarters on Tuesday. fourIt was planned before the transition from the Biden to the Trump administrations. Mr. Rubio planned to hold bilateral meetings with each of the foreign ministers after the Quad talks.

Mr. Rubio was the first cabinet secretary to be confirmed by Mr. Trump. He has been in the Senate representing Florida since 2011 and has served on the Foreign Relations and Intelligence Committees. It was unanimously confirmed by the Senate on Monday evening.

Mr. Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, has made clear the need to confront the Chinese Communist Party in particular.

Mr. Trump’s foreign aid order is the president’s directive that most affects operations at the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID. Monday, Mr. Trump signed the order suspend any disbursement of foreign aid funds and any new appropriations pending a 90-day review, subject to instructions to be issued by the secretary of state.

This means that millions of dollars that would normally be spent to support programs on the continent – programs that provide basic daily sustenance for many people – are being frozen.

A US official said that non-governmental groups and contractors who use the money in the programs are scrambling to figure out what to do, and that many programs in poor and war- or disaster-stricken parts of the world could end abruptly.

The executive order says the 90-day evaluation will review “program effectiveness and consistency with United States foreign policy.”

“The US foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are inconsistent with American interests and, in many cases, antithetical to American values,” he said. “They serve to disrupt world peace by promoting ideas in foreign countries that are directly opposed to harmonious and stable relations at home and between countries.”