WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Breitbart News exclusively that President Donald Trump and his administration are aiming to peel Russia off of China in much the same way former President Richard Nixon, during the Cold War, peeled China off of the Soviet Union.
“I don’t know if we’ll ever be successful completely at peeling them off of a relationship with the Chinese,” Rubio said when asked if Trump’s efforts to end the war in Ukraine are similar to Nixon’s famous moment of heading to China to curb the Soviet Union. “I also don’t think having China and Russia at each other’s neck is good for global stability because they’re both nuclear powers, but I do think we’re in a situation now where the Russians have become increasingly dependent on the Chinese and that’s not a good outcome either if you think about it.”
Rubio said that U.S-China relations will define this century, and as such, the better outcome for both the Russians and the Americans is that the Russians are not purely dependent on China as a “junior partner.”
“The big story of the 21st century is going to be U.S.-Chinese relations,” Rubio said. “If Russia becomes a permanent junior partner to China in the long term, now you’re talking about two nuclear powers aligned against the United States, and even ten years from now or five years from now, if this trend continues, we could find ourselves in a situation where whether Russia wants to improve its relations with the U.S. or not, they can’t because they’ve become completely dependent on the Chinese because we have cut them off. I don’t know if that’s a good outcome for us. What’s a better outcome for us is to have a relationship. We’re going to have competition and maybe even direct confrontation — not militarily I hope, but otherwise — with the Chinese because they’re doing all kinds of cheating and stealing when it comes to trade and economics. We’re going to have disagreements with the Russians, but we have to have a relationship with both. These are big, powerful countries with nuclear stockpiles. They can project power globally. I think we have lost the concept of maturity and sanity in diplomatic relations. Part of diplomatic relations is the ability to communicate with and manage through problems with other great powers around the world to avoid war and to avoid conflict. But I think having a situation where the Russians are permanently a junior partner to China, having to do whatever China says to do because they are dependent on them, I don’t think that’s a good outcome for Russia and it’s not a good outcome for America or for Europe or the world.”
Rubio’s first foreign trip as Secretary of State was in the Western Hemisphere, to Panama. During his visit, he succeeded in convincing the Panamanian government to leave China’s Belt and Road Initiative. The Chinese use the Belt and Road Initiative as a tool to build a global hegemony, capturing less wealthy nations with debt diplomacy using loans and finance as a foreign policy and economic weapon. In Panama, where the Panama Canal is located, this Chinese effort severely threatened U.S. commerce because the Panama Canal is critical for the United States for a number of reasons.
“Well, look, the Panama Canal was built by the United States, and we built it because without it, it would take days and days for us to get over to the Pacific and it’s a very important strategic situation for us,” Rubio told Breitbart News. “Unfortunately, Jimmy Carter gave it over to the Panamanians, and you wake up 20 years later and because of a bunch of issues including corruption, the Chinese basically own the two big ports — the Hutchison ports on both sides of the canal. So in a time of conflict, with those ports and all the other tentacles they have established in the canal, in a time of conflict, the Chinese could impede canal traffic. That’s the fear.”
“As President Trump likes to say,” he continuted, “we didn’t give the canal back to China — we gave it to Panama. So I think also, not the current president of Panama — who’s very pro-American — but under the previous president, the Panamanians abandoned Taiwan and took in all kinds of money and became more pro-China. And so it’s good that we have a partner there that’s more pro-American, and he did end Belt and Road Initiative, which is the first country in Latin America to end the Belt and Road Initiative. It’s good that they’re undertaking an audit of the Chinese companies that run those two ports. We’ll see how that audit turns out — I think they’re going to find some bad stuff there when they do that audit. So hopefully that will not be owned by them.”
While the U.S. has been playing defense like this against the Chinese Communist Party’s Belt and Road Initiative — convincing countries like Panama to leave it, or other countries to not join it — what has been lacking mostly until now is an offensive strategy against the Chinese hegemonic plan. Trump seems to be unlocking that, as he signed an agreement with the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to further pursue what is called the India-Middle East-Europe-Economic Corridor (IMEC), which seeks to build economic and diplomatic trade routes from the Far East in India through the Middle East then into Europe through Cyprus and Greece.
“I think there’s more big deals like that coming under President Trump,” Rubio said when asked about IMEC and the India deal that Trump and Modi signed. “It’s interesting because I know you always read that President Trump is an isolationist. No, no — he’s not an isolationist. President Trump, what he wants, is America to be respected again in the world and for our interests to be defended all over the world. It is not in our interest to live in a world, particularly in a hemisphere we call home, surrounded by countries that have taken on loans and debt from China that put them at China’s mercy. China loans you all this money and you can’t pay them back so now they hold this over your head and you have to vote with them at the U.N., and you have to do whatever it is they tell you to do. In the direction we were going, we were going to wake up one day and realize the Chinese were setting up naval bases in the Western Hemisphere from where they can threaten us, we were going to wake up and realize that they were the dominant trading partner with all the countries that are our neighbors. So what President Trump has a desire to do, and I think you see the work already beginning to reverse all of that, it’s not just in the hemisphere we call home but also around the world, like in the Indo-Pacific. We have allies over there like Japan, South Korea, the Phillipines, Australia, India obviously. These are countries that don’t want to live in an Indo-Pacific dominated by China where they are considered vassal states. They want the U.S. to remain their partners. They want us to remain engaged and involved. Under President Trump, that’s what we’re doing, from a position of strength not from a position of weakness.”
For IMEC to succeed, the Abraham Accords would need to further materialize and see Saudi Arabia finally join, as well as other Arab nations in the Gulf. Of course, the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza after October 7 undermined that for the time being, but as the hostage release deal and ceasefire has held, the hopes for a bigger, longer-lasting solution for Gaza have gotten stronger. In addition to unlocking deals throughout the Middle East to connect the Far East to Europe, European partners like Greece and Cyprus have expressed immense interest in seeing this IMEC trade corridor through to completion. A recent panel that Breitbart News moderated at the Delphi Forum in Washington, DC, hosted by the Hellenic American Leadership Council saw both the deputy foreign ministers of Greece and Cyprus excited at the prospects of expanded dealmaking with Trump back in the White House. What is more, the fact that Rubio’s meeting with his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov happened in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia seems like no accident — aimed at greasing the skids for eventual partnerships and deals with not just the Russians but also the Saudis.
“In the case of that, I would say the Saudis have been a good partner of the United States,” Rubio told Breitbart News. “The Crown Prince is making tremendous progress in that country. Think about it: At that meeting, you had the three largest oil producers in the world theoretically in the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Russia meeting, and we talk about energy and how important energy is to the future. I think under President Trump, what you’re going to have is a foreign policy of strength, a foreign policy that rewards our friends and makes it costly to be America’s enemy and to try to undermine us. I think you’re going to have a foreign policy and an economic policy where you’re not going to be taken advantage of anymore. For a long time, our foreign policy was completely devoid in thinking about the national interest. We thought our job was to be some sort of global government. We’re not a global government. We’re the government of the United States. Our number one priority needs to be our national interest. That needs to be defined. You have to define what it is. Then every policy and every dollar you spend by the way in foreign aid has to be in furtherance of that national interest. I think that’s the kind of common sense President Trump is bringing back to foreign policy and that we’re trying to do here at the State Department.”
Rubio also in this part of the interview noted several other successes the U.S. has had with Panama in Trump’s first month in office, from cybersecurity to controlling migration.
“It’s great that last week the Admiral than runs Southern Command visited Panama and signed a cyber agreement because Panama is very concerned that the Chinese and others may have created cyber intrusions that threaten the stability of the canal,” Rubio said. “So these are all positive developments. And on top of that, they took back three or four hundred migrants that they sent from third countries — not Panamanian, but third countries. They were flown to Panama and then sent to a camp in the Darien Gap, and about half of them have already been sent out to their original country of origin. These are people that were in America and were not Panamanian, but we wanted to get them out of the United States so they went to Panama and then from Panama, they went to their countries of origin, their original countries. We hope that the rest will be able to migrate back to their country of origin. Interestingly, additionally, there were a bunch of migrants halfway to the U.S. when President Trump took over — they got the news that Joe Biden is no longer in the White House and migration into the U.S. is no longer going to be allowed in an illegal way, they’ve done a U-turn and now they find themselves back in Panama. Panama is asking us to help facilitate getting them back to their home countries. They have like 500 Venezuelans trying to get back to Venezuela. So this is all good. I think you’ve seen illegal migration numbers collapse in the last four weeks since President Trump took over. I think we’ve been able to end the sort of mass migration crisis at the border. Now, we have to keep it that way, and we have to deal obviously with the people who are here illegally especially the violent criminals. They’re very dangerous people.”
More from Rubio’s exclusive interview with Breitbart News is forthcoming.
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