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Marco Rubio presents ‘America First’ world view at hearingpublished at 17:58 Greenwich Mean Time

17:58 GMT

Tom Bateman
State Department correspondent, reporting from Capitol Hill

Here in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee room, we’ve had the chance to hear the big world view of the man who will almost certainly be confirmed as Donald Trump’s chief diplomat.

Marco Rubio has tried to put the current moment in the context of a century of history. He compares the United States now to the time after World War II, when America brought a broken world back to order.

The current crisis, he believes, is due to America allowing the world order it built after World War II to morph into a “liberal world order” in which “all of humanity was now destined to give up national sovereignty and national identity.”

The dominance of global free markets had undermined domestic working classes and led to mass migration, which threatened global stability, he said. Trump was elected to fix it, he suggests. This has been “America First” in Rubio parlance.

But he is at pains to point out that he does not think the US is turning on itself, rather that Washington’s role is to engage with the world, but through policies designed to serve Americans first: by weakening its adversaries and protecting its domestic industry, energy and supply chains.

“Putting the interests of America and Americans above all else has never been more relevant or more necessary,” he says.

Meanwhile, he says China has risen to unparalleled prominence and become the biggest threat to both the United States and world stability.