Marco Rubio defends Donald Trump’s foreign policy while tempering peace expectations

Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for free

Your guide to what Trump’s second term means for Washington, business and the world

US secretary of state Marco Rubio delivered a resounding endorsement of the Trump administration’s foreign policy, defending the president as a “peacemaker”, while downplaying expectations for what follows from the agreements the president has facilitated to end global conflicts.

“Peacemaking isn’t just signing a piece of paper. It’s actually complying with it. And compliance oftentimes requires . . . in most cases, requires daily, constant follow-up and nurture,” said Rubiowho is also Donald Trump’s national security adviser.

The two-hour news conference from Rubio, who rarely takes extensive questions from the press, was the administration’s lengthiest public defence yet of its peacemaking efforts as well as its more contentious foreign policy decisions this year.

Trump has overseen a significant reordering of national security priorities from his first term, placing greater emphasis on the western hemisphere and drug-trafficking in the region as the US has sought to pull back from Europe and the Middle East.

Since re-entering office in January, Trump has launched a pressure campaign against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, severely restricted visa and citizenship pathways across the US immigration system and pivoted away from long-standing alliances in Europe.

Trump has said repeatedly he has “solved” eight wars in his first 10 months back in office — a claim challenged by the facts on the ground in Gaza, at the Cambodian-Thai border and in the Democratic Republic of Congo where fighting with Rwanda has resumed.

While October’s Gaza ceasefire was widely lauded as the president’s biggest foreign policy achievement, the deal has appeared increasingly shaky as the administration’s “phase 2” plans have sputtered and fighting and Israeli bombing in the territory continue.

“Peace is a verb. It’s an action . . . Every single day will bring challenges,” Rubio said Friday, in what was also the state department’s first news briefing since August.

“Nobody would argue that what we have in place now is sustainable,” he said of Gaza. “We have to get through the completion of phase one.”

He said Trump has devoted significant effort towards ending the war between Russia and Ukraine and would continue those efforts.

Special envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner met in Miami on Friday with Ukraine’s lead negotiator Rustem Umerov for further talks on ending the war in Ukraine. They were joined by the British, French and German national security advisers, a White House official said.

“What we’re trying to figure out here is, what can Ukraine live with and what can Russia live with,” said Rubio, who dismissed reports that the administration had sought to pressure Ukraine into accepting a peace deal.

He indicated that he may join the Miami talks on Saturday, but added that ultimately the administration’s view was that “it’s a war in another continent. We’ve got issues in our own hemisphere we need to be dealing with.”

The Trump administration has faced mounting pressure from congressional Democrats over the legality of its military campaign against alleged drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean, but Rubio dismissed those criticisms as political opponents playing politics.

“Nothing has happened that requires us to notify Congress or get congressional approval or cross the threshold in the war,” Rubio said on Friday.

Hours after Rubio’s address, the US military said on Friday night it had “commenced a large-scale strike against ISIS infrastructure and weapons sites in Syria”, despite a recent national security directive to downgrade the Middle East as a security focus.

US Central Command suggested the strikes came in retaliation for an attack on US forces in Syria last weekend that killed three Americans. The military declined to say how many locations or individuals it had targeted. It said the operation was “ongoing”.

In his address, Rubio also defended the administration’s immigration crackdown and the scrutiny it is applying to existing legal residents and visa holders.

“Perhaps the overwhelming majority of them are not bad people,” Rubio conceded of the migrants and refugees who arrived during Joe Biden’s presidency. But the Trump administration’s crackdown was justified because the administration knew “for a fact” that some foreigners were insufficiently vetted, he said.