Sec. Marco Rubio: NATO Has To Be Valuable to the United States

RUBIO: “ I think we all know what the situation here is. Number one is, like always, and this is not new, I mean, if you go back 30 years, there has never been a time where there hasn’t been a debate in American politics about what our presence and our contribution to NATO should be, and that's always driven by what is the value of NATO to the United States. I understand NATO is valuable to Europe, and it should be. It also has to be valuable to the United States. So we always have to make that argument, in every administration and every era. And that’s what we’re in the process of doing now, is explaining, you know, 'This is the value of NATO to the United States.' Related to that is what our force posture is within that alliance and what our contributions are. So, obviously, one of the things that I’ve always used and I've long been an advocate for NATO in my time in the Senate, and one of the arguments I always made was that these bases in the region provided us logistical options that we wouldn’t otherwise have. And when some of those bases are denied to you during a conflict that we’re involved in, then you question whether that value is still there. So that will have to be discussed, there's no doubt about it. I think there will also have to be some focus on how a year after the meeting at the Hague, how much progress has been made in terms of the increased contributions. There are some countries that have doubled their defense spending in the last few years, there are others that are still lagging. And the end the goal is to have a NATO that is strong. The stronger our NATO allies are, the stronger NATO is going to be."

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Sec. Marco Rubio: NATO Has To Be Valuable to the United StatesNews & Politics,InternationalEXCERPT:RUBIO: “ I think we all know what the situation here is. Number one is, like always, and this is not new, I mean, if you go back 30 years, there has never been a time where there hasn’t been a debate in American politics about what our presence and our contribution to NATO should be, and that's always driven by what is the value of NATO to the United States. I understand NATO is valuable to Europe, and it should be. It also has to be valuable to the United States. So we always have to make that argument, in every administration and every era. And that’s what we’re in the process of doing now, is explaining, you know, 'This is the value of NATO to the United States.' Related to that is what our force posture is within that alliance and what our contributions are. So, obviously, one of the things that I’ve always used and I've long been an advocate for NATO in my time in the Senate, and one of the arguments I always made was that these bases in the region provided us logistical options that we wouldn’t otherwise have. And when some of those bases are denied to you during a conflict that we’re involved in, then you question whether that value is still there. So that will have to be discussed, there's no doubt about it. I think there will also have to be some focus on how a year after the meeting at the Hague, how much progress has been made in terms of the increased contributions. There are some countries that have doubled their defense spending in the last few years, there are others that are still lagging. And the end the goal is to have a NATO that is strong. The stronger our NATO allies are, the stronger NATO is going to be."Video filesFullCompactSort byDateSummaryRelevancePopularityPer page81216Audio filesFullCompactSort byDateSummaryRelevancePopularityPer page81216Recipient e-mailMessage (optional)Preview

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