President-elect Donald Trump named Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida as his nominee for secretary of state on Wednesday, setting up a onetime critic who evolved into one of the president-elect’s fiercest defenders to become the nation’s top diplomat.
The conservative lawmaker is a noted hawk on China, Cuba and Iran, and was a finalist to be Trump’s running mate this summer.
Rubio, the vice-ranking Republican member of the Select Committee on Intelligence and a senior member of the Committee on Foreign Relations, has years of foreign policy experience.
He has built a name for himself as a proponent of a more hardline approach to U.S. foreign adversaries such as China, Iran, and Cuba.
Trump's second term will face a precarious world with ongoing wars in both Ukraine and the Middle East, along with a far more aggressive Chinese communist regime.
In the Senate, Rubio has been a vocal critic of Beijing and has said that countering the Chinese regime is a top priority.
In 2019, he sounded the alarm over the acquisition of Musical.ly by Chinese social media app TikTok’s parent company, Bytedance, leading to a federal national security review.
Amid growing tensions around CCP aggression toward Taiwan, Rubio said in July that he expects that U.S. support for the democratic island will continue.
“I don't have any worries about the U.S. being supportive of Taiwan and doing everything we can to discourage the Chinese from invading,” he told reporters in Milwaukee.
On Ukraine, Rubio said last week that he believes that the United States is “funding a stalemate that’s costing lives” and called for the war to be brought to a close.
He would likely face little opposition from a Republican-controlled Senate.
Under Florida law, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has the power to select Rubio’s successor to hold his seat until the next general election.
Rubio's Democratic colleague Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) has already given his endorsement.
“Unsurprisingly, the other team’s pick will have political differences than my own,” he wrote on social media platform X. “That being said, my colleague @SenMarcoRubio is a strong choice and I look forward to voting for his confirmation.”