Senate Foreign Relations Committee member Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) questions witnesses during a hearing about Venezuela in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill August 04, 2020 in Washington, DC. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

With 37 days until the U.S. presidential election, Senator Marco Rubio sat down with Hudson Distinguished Fellow Walter Russell Mead to highlight the key global challenges that will confront the next administration, from China's military adventurism to the downstream effects if a coronavirus vaccine is unequally distributed. Informed by his work as acting chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence and as a senior member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Senator Rubio shared his candid thoughts with Mr. Mead as part of Hudson's Dialogues on American Foreign Policy and World Affairs.

See key takeaways from Senator Rubio below, and join us next week for a series of events on the future of U.S. manufacturing, co-hosted by Indiana University and moderated by Senior Fellow Tom Duesterberg.

Global Challenges for the Next Term

Highlighted takeaways from Senator Marco Rubio's remarks during his conversation with Hudson Distinguished Fellow Walter Russell Mead:

1.  The likelihood that China starts a “war of choice” to signal its strength:

I think at some point in the near future, China’s going to have to pick a war of choice, a place where they put their military power to use, to prove it. You can build all the ships and all the capabilities you want. Until you’ve used it, no one believes you have it, so I think they need to find somewhere where they’re going to test it out. It has to be a place where they could maybe win quickly and escalate before there’s any sort of global mobilization against them and I worry that could spiral very quickly if they pick the wrong place.

For all of their growing military power, the Chinese really haven’t been involved in military conflict for a long time on a large and extended scale, so you worry about the exuberance of generals and military officials who feel pretty confident about their abilities and want to put these toys to use.

2. The unknowns surrounding Ayatollah Khomeini’s successor and a nuclear Iran:

We don’t know who’s going to succeed the current Ayatollah, who clearly is not going to be around for much longer. It might be another decade from now. We don’t know what that transition looks like. We don’t know if the direction that that clerical regime moves is more aggressive and more abrasive, and frankly, there is that concern that they develop this capability.

From an Iranian standpoint, they don’t even have to build a weapon, they just have to prove that they’re nuclear-capable and it buys them some level of immunity, but then there’s the second facet of it, and that is elements within that government that actually believe that they could use such a weapon and win, use it successfully in some conflict, be it from a tactical weapon eventually or a strategic strike on Israel, as an example. There’s no way there’s going to be a Shia bomb [and not] a Sunni one, and so some other countries in the region will quickly move to have their own capability. Suddenly you have multiple nuclear powers in the most conflictive part of the world. 

3. Venezuela arming up if the conventional arms sales ban expires in October:

If you were to begin to see weapons sales [to Venezuela], which I think is a possibility if in October, the conventional weapons ban is lifted against Iran. Now, you could see [Iran] beginning to share weaponry with the Venezuelan military, which is problematic because in addition to them, there are all sorts of criminal elements that control large swaths of Venezuela, the FARC, the ELN, other criminal groups, and it would be a catastrophic outcome to see those groups wind up in possession of advanced weaponry that they can use to target Colombian and U.S. anti-drug efforts, anti-cocaine efforts in that region, and so forth. 

4. Russia’s efforts to undermine American interests:

[The United States is] 244 years old. We’re still a young country from a relative point of view and we are made up of people who come from all over the world a generation two or three removed from it. These nations we’re dealing with have long histories that deeply infuse public policymaking even to this day, which is different from ours in that sense.

In the case of Russia, they have memories of both being a great empire under the czar and then again under the Soviet Union, and in many ways, Putin is a product of both, and you’ve seen him try to meld the two into a czarist-type role that he plays. Now, he’s not going to be a great economic power and he’s not going to be a great conventional power, but he can be a spoiler in enough places that he becomes relevant.

To the extent that there are places we can cooperate and work with them, we should, but we also need to recognize that what helps Putin both internationally and domestically is to act as a spoiler to American interests and no amount of being nice to him is going to change that and approach it as such, whether it’s in the Middle East or the Western Hemisphere or other parts of the world.

5. The pandemic’s destabilizing effects in developing countries:

It’s not just about the infection rate, it is the devastating impact [the global pandemic has] had on many economies and multiple countries. What it will mean if there’s a recovery and resources available to some, but not others. Nations where a vaccine or a cure may be available to people that are connected, but not to those who aren’t, so you worry about that sort of instability in the long term. In this pandemic, the tail on the thing is pretty long and its impact is going to be felt for years to come in many developing countries, so you worry that that would lead to political disruption and the failure of nation-states in multiple places.

Quotes have been edited for length and clarity

Go Deeper: Looking Ahead