US Secretary of State Marco Rubio rejected claims from Democratic lawmakers on Tuesday that Washington was retreating from its long-standing commitments to humanitarian assistance and human rights or that China could replace the US as a global aid leader.
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Rubio’s appearance at two congressional hearings Tuesday follows growing concern that drastic cuts to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) are undermining decades of US soft power and giving China a huge global propaganda win, arguments the top US diplomat sought to counter.
“China doesn’t do humanitarian aid. China does predatory lending – that’s what Belt and Road Initiative is,” Rubio told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at a morning hearing, referring to Beijing’s sweeping infrastructure plan that has spent more than US$1 trillion globally since 2013.
Rubio faced an early challenge from Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the committee’s senior Democrat, who argued that because of the dismantling of USAID and other foreign aid cuts since the start of US President Donald Trump’s second term in January, China was outpacing and poised to supplant the US in development sectors like global health.
“There’s no evidence whatsoever that China has either the capacity or the will to replace the US in humanitarian assistance, in food deliveries or in developmental assistance,” Rubio responded.
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Further, he continued, the US was not withdrawing from the world: “I just hit 18 countries in 18 weeks. That doesn’t sound like much of a withdrawal.”
