The U.S. needs to engage Russia and China at the highest level, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a wide-ranging Jan. 30 interview with Megyn Kelly.
“And so ultimately when you’re dealing with great powers like China, it’s going to be at the highest levels of their president and ours or their premier and ours—and our president, and that interaction will happen. In the case of Russia, the same. Obviously, there’s going to be—whatever happens with Russia will be a Putin-Trump dynamic.”
On resolving the Ukraine conflict, Rubio said: “So the President’s point of view is this a protracted conflict and it needs to end. Now, it needs to end through a negotiation. In any negotiation, both sides are going to have to give something up. I’m not going to pre-negotiate that. I mean, that’s going to be the work of hard diplomacy, which is what we used to do in the world in the past, and we were realistic about it. But both sides in a negotiation have to give something. And that’s going to take time, but at least we have a President that recognizes that our objective is this conflict needs to end, and it needs to end in a way that’s enduring, because it’s an unsustainable—on all sides, it’s ultimately unsustainable.”
