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The U.S. is “not just in a competition” with the Chinese Communist Party, but also “in a conflict,” a leading hawk on China and Republican senator says.
“We’re in a conflict, and I say conflict. People think conflict; they think war. I don’t want there to be a war,” Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said at an event Tuesday at The Heritage Foundation. “There’s never been a conventional war between two nuclear powers, so no one can tell you where that goes over the long term. Probably not to a very good place.” (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
“I don’t want there to be a war, but that doesn’t mean we’re not in a conflict. We are in a conflict,” said Rubio, a senior Republican on the Senate Committee for Foreign Relations. “A geopolitical conflict, a diplomatic conflict, a societal conflict, a technological, a commercial, a trade, at every level and frankly, certainly a military competition when it comes to capabilities.”
Rubio, vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, added:
So, we are in conflict, and we are in a conflict with a nation state that doesn’t just seek to replace us … doesn’t just seek to be the most powerful nation in the world. They seek to reorient the world.
Rubio has been one of the most outspoken critics of the Chinese Communist Party. President Joe Biden signed into law Rubio’s Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act in December 2021. Then-President Donald Trump signed into law his Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020 in June 2020.
Rubio, along with Reps. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., and Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., introduced legislation in December aimed at banning the popular Chinese app TikTok nationwide. Rubio reintroduced the legislation with Sen.
