U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio says for the sake of peace, whatever people feel about Russian President Vladimir Putin does not matter. Rubio had once called Putin a thug.
“But at the end of the day, what we feel about Vladimir Putin is irrelevant to achieving peace here. What we’re trying to do now is get people – we have to be grownups here. We’re trying to get people to a negotiating table,” said Rubio in an interview with Fox News.
The U.S. secretary of state added, “You don’t get people to a negotiating table like Vladimir Putin by calling him names, by being antagonistic. This is a costly war.
“It’s cost billions of dollars for the United States, billions of dollars for Europe, three million Ukrainians no longer living in the country. So this is not a – this is not a PR thing. This is not a political campaign. This is real-world every day.”
Rubio noted that if this war goes on for another year like some people say it should, “that’s thousands of dead people.”
“So this is real stuff. We have to be serious and mature about it. And in the work of diplomacy, you don’t get someone to the table, right – I can’t attract someone to sit down at a table and tell us what they’re interested in doing about ending a war if we’re insulting them, no matter how we may feel about them,” Rubio explained. “I’m sure they have said very mean things about me, but we want to get this thing done. We want peace.”
In the Fox News interview, Rubio also mentioned that “NATO is not in jeopardy.”
However, the U.S. diplomat said, “The only thing that puts NATO in jeopardy is the fact that we have NATO Allies who barely have militaries or whose militaries are not very capable because they’ve spent 40 years not spending any money on it. We’ve been NATO.
“All President Trump has argued is what every president, every American president, has argued for the last 30 years, and that is these are rich countries, okay? These are rich countries, especially in Western Europe.
“They have plenty of money. They should be investing that in their national security, and they’re not. You have countries spending 1.5 per cent, one per cent of their economy, and we just can’t keep subsidizing that. It’s not fair and it’s not sustainable.”
Rubio said, “That’s what puts NATO in jeopardy is that we don’t have Allies in some cases. Now, others have done it. Poland, Czechia – there’s a bunch of countries that have done it, but some have not. And these are rich countries – Germany, France. We know this. So that has to be fixed.”
