SECRETARY RUBIO: Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity to speak to you today. I'll try to stay under the five minutes and - so we can get time for questions here.
So when I took this job - and I said this during my confirmation hearing - the most important thing we need to do is return American foreign policy to be centered on our national interests. For far too long, that had been lost as a concept of foreign policy. In essence, in many cases, oftentimes the U.S. engaged in the world on the basis of what was good for the global order or the international community and what like. And look, for about 30 years, that made a lot of sense - until the end of the post-Cold War era.
(Protest utterances.)
So that made a lot of sense for a long period of time during the Cold War. But then we entered the post-Cold War era, and the war - and the world order has rapidly changed. We entered a new era about 12 or 14 years ago when we entered an era of near-peer competition, where, for the first time since the end of the Cold War, the United States had a near-peer competitor and adversary in the state of China. And we need to confront that, and our foreign policy needs to be geared around that and all the realities of this new world.
And so what that means is we have to have a State Department that can deliver on a foreign policy that is rooted in the national interests of the United States. To defend the national interests of the United States requires us, number one, to make sure that every dollar we spend and every action we take has to have measurable outcomes that deliver for the American people. They have to either make our country safer or they have to make our country stronger or they have to help make our country more prosperous. It has to do at least one of those three things, and ideally, whether it's a program or a measure that we take, it should do all three of them.
Now, that - what that means is that there are some great causes in the world. There really are. There are some great causes. There are some horrifying things that are happening on the planet. America cannot solve every single one of them. What we need to focus on is prioritizing our foreign policy to those areas that are in our national interests.
Now, we will still remain the largest contributor of foreign aid and humanitarian assistance on this planet, by far. The United States, even under the budget that's before you today and the changes we have made, will still contribute more in foreign aid than the next 10 countries combined, than the entire OECD or the next closest country. It's not China. It's Germany, and it's way behind us even now. But that foreign aid has to be geared towards our foreign - to our national interests. We need to design a State Department that delivers on that.
Yes, we canceled a bunch of contracts in USAID. Some were stupid and outrageous. Others didn't serve the national interest. And others we kept. And we are folding it under the Department of State. And you know why? Because we want it to be part of the toolbox of foreign policy, not a standalone. It is not charity. Foreign aid is not charity. It is designed to further the national interests of the United States.
So we will do humanitarian assistance. We will do food assistance. We will do developmental assistance. And we will do security assistance. But we will do it driven by our embassies and our regional bureaus. Because what those issues mean look very different in Guatemala than they may in Chad or in Kenya or in some other part of the world in the Indo-Pacific.
And so one of the things that we have tried to do in our reorganization is drive power and influence on policy making and decision making to the regional bureaus and ultimately to our embassies. Our embassies, our ambassadors, are the front line of American foreign policy. The most important thing I do every single day is not read memos, it's read cables. Every night I get 10, 15 select cables from stations around the world, different embassies. The best ideas in that building come from the ground up from our embassies.
Now, I want to tell you something else. Look, I did serve in the Senate for a long time, so this is a new job to me. When I got there, I'd get a memo. I still get these memos. I should have brought one today. In order for an idea to reach me, a decision to reach the Secretary of State, some of these things have to be checked off by 40 people, 40 boxes. And if any one of these people has a question, they can hold it up before the idea even ever gets to me. Now, that sounds like a crazy thing to begin with. We can't afford it in the 21st century. We have to be able to move very quickly. And a case in point is what happened last week.
Syria, under a new authority - granted, people with some checkered background - is on the verge of collapse, potentially. And if it collapses, it will devolve into civil war. And civil war will mean that it will become a playground for ISIS and other jihadists, not to mention Iranian influence coming back in. So there's no guarantee that by outreach and working with the transitional authority in Syria, things are going to work out. It may work out; it may not work out. But if we don't reach out and try, it's guaranteed to not work out.
And so we had to move very quickly to action that. If we had not done sanctions relief last week - and now the EU has followed suit - then our partners in the region could not have provided donor dollars so that that transitional authority could try to stabilize its governance of the country. That place could have collapsed within weeks and become an ISIS playground once again. There is no way that a traditional system could have delivered on that. It would have gone to the interagency. It would have gone to six to nine months of debate. Any individual could have held it up with an information hold, and we never would have acted. We can't afford it. The world moves too quickly. And so we need to drive policy from the ground up, from our embassies and our regional bureaus, and that's what we're doing. And that's what we're doing.
On the last point I would make about foreign aid, foreign aid has to be part of our portfolio, part of what we do, and it has to be consistent with our agenda in any region of the world or any country. And oftentimes you will find - and maybe some of you have found when you travel; you go talk to an ambassador and they will tell you - what USAID was pushing and what they are pushing in the country are not just different, they're in contradiction. And in many cases, USAID programs were undermining the mission of the embassy.
That's a fact, and I heard that over and over again. I've heard it in the Caribbean Basin and I've heard it in other parts of the world. I am not the first Secretary of State that wanted USAID and foreign aid to be under the Department of State; I'm just the first that's been able to do it. And I'm glad we've done it, and it will deliver better foreign policy and, frankly, more accountability and more oversight opportunities for your committee down the road. Thank you.
