A wise choice

President-elect Donald Trump recently announced his choice for secretary of state: Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. The one-time presidential candidate, former speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, and longtime member of the U.S. Senate is a wise choice.

Since Thomas Jefferson served as the nation’s first top diplomat, 71 secretaries of state have served the United States. Few have been as good as John Quincy Adams, who negotiated the acquisition of Florida from Spain and helped establish the Monroe Doctrine. Still, while this role ultimately serves at the pleasure of the president, it can have an enormous effect on America’s security and safety while promoting peace around the world.

Sen. Rubio has served on the Senate Foreign Relations and Intelligence committees and has become a powerful advocate for American interests and against America’s enemies, including totalitarian regimes in China, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and Cuba. He has also been a powerful and unrelenting advocate for Israel’s right to exist. In his role as co-chairman of the bipartisan Congressional-Executive Commission on China, he has decried the forced labor and unfair trade practices of the Chinese Communist Party.

Rubio, if confirmed by his Senate colleagues, will enter this role at a dangerous time in the world, with war on the European continent, conflicts in the Middle East, and China’s increasingly aggressive posture toward Taiwan. He would be tasked not only with representing America’s interests abroad but also with reforming a department that is often conflicted about its own mission. Not only did the Biden administration project American weakness, it insisted on conditioning American aid based on progressive social policy, angering many allies and would-be allies. You can be sure that a State Department under this socially conservative tea party stalwart will not be browbeating nations to adopt the LGBTQ agenda and abortion on demand. And you can be sure he won’t coddle tyrants nor apologize for American success.

The new secretary will be tasked with challenges such as helping negotiate peace in Ukraine and the Middle East. He’ll also have an opportunity to build on some of President Trump’s first-term successes, such as the Abraham Accords as well as former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s aggressive promotion of international religious freedom.

Rubio will bring both his compelling American story as the son of a Cuban immigrant who escaped communism and his deep belief in American ideals: “My dad was a bartender. My mom was a cashier, a hotel maid, and a stock clerk at Kmart. They never made it big. They were never rich. And yet they were successful. Because just a few decades removed from hopelessness, they made possible for us all the things that had been impossible for them.”

His speeches, on behalf of freedom, religious liberty, the goodness of the nuclear family, and the sanctity of life are often inspiring and courageous. No doubt these same rhetorical gifts will serve President Trump’s agenda to achieve peace in the world through American strength. What’s more, his fluency in Spanish and knowledge of the nations in the Western Hemisphere will help President Trump solve vexing issues such as immigration, the Mexican drug cartels, and the fentanyl crisis. He’ll be a key adviser in dealing with Cuba and unstable nations like Haiti and Venezuela. This was a role he played, in part, during President Trump’s first term.

Rubio understands that America cannot be the world’s policeman, nor should we foolishly enter conflicts that are not in our interests. America has limited resources and must steward them wisely. Yet the incoming secretary of state understands that a weakened America abroad is a weakened America at home, a world where the loss of American leadership emboldens tyrants and despots.

In a speech on foreign policy, he once said, “Like Washington, Reagan viewed the construction of a strong military not as a preparation for aggression but as an action to prevent aggression. In his words, ‘A truly successful army is one that, because of its strength and ability and dedication, will not be called upon to fight, for no one will dare to provoke it.’”

A strong America not only makes the world safer for human flourishing, it makes America safer from those who would threaten our freedom, our ideals, and our way of life. This is why conservative Christians should applaud the choice of Marco Rubio as the nation’s 72nd secretary of state.