Marco Rubio explains the “America First” worldview at the hearingpublished at 5:58 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time

17:58 GMT

Tom Bateman
State Department correspondent reporting from Capitol Hill

Here in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee room, we had the opportunity to hear the full picture of the man who will almost certainly be confirmed as Donald Trump’s chief diplomat.

Marco Rubio tried to place the current moment in the context of a hundred-year history. He compares the United States today to the moment after World War II, when America repaired a shattered world.

In his view, the current crisis is due to America allowing the world order it built after World War II to transform into a “liberal world order” in which “all humanity was now destined to assert its national sovereignty and to give up national identity”.

The dominance of global free markets has undermined domestic working classes and led to mass migration that threatens global stability, he said. Trump was elected to fix the problem, he suggests. This was “America First” in Rubio-speak.

But he is at pains to emphasize that this does not mean that the United States focuses on itself, but rather that Washington’s role is to engage with the world through policies designed to serve Americans first : by weakening its opponents and protecting its domestic industry, energy and energy supply chains.

“Never has it been more important or more necessary to put the interests of America and Americans above all else,” he said.

China has now risen to unprecedented prominence and become the greatest threat to both the United States and world stability, he says.