- Potential 2016 presidential contender Sen. Marco Rubio tours Asian nations
- His trip to the region helps boost his foreign policy credentials
- Rubio affirmed the importance of America’s economic and military interests in Asia
Washington (CNN) — As Gov. Chris Christie continues to fend off accusations of corruption in New Jersey, another Republican with possible designs on the White House, Marco Rubio, spent last week 7,000 miles away from the controversy, burnishing his foreign policy resume with a three-country trip through Asia.
The Florida senator made a busy, weeklong visit to the Philippines, Japan and South Korea — a trip that brought him face to face with top officials from all three countries, the boxer Manny Pacquiao and a pair of DMZ-stationed North Korean soldiers, who took pictures of the man who one day may sit in the White House.
The ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations East Asian and Pacific Affairs Subcommittee, Rubio was making his first jaunt to Asia, a region he called the next big flash point in global affairs.
“All of the emerging major issues of the 21st century over the next 50 years are going to be in Asia, given the population growth, and given the instability that you see in North Korea, given the rise of China,” Rubio told CNN in a weekend phone interview from Seoul, South Korea.
The three countries he visited “want us here,” Rubio said. “And not just engaged militarily, but they want us engaged economically, culturally. They are comfortable with us. They’ve built these longstanding alliances that they want to build on and improve.”
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Rubio affirmed the importance of America’s economic and military interests in Asia and expressed support for the so-called “rebalance” — the Obama administration’s effort to re-engage with Asia by forging deeper alliances with friendly nations and pursuing a stable relationship with China.
“In fairness, I think they’re doing a lot of the things we need to be doing,” he said.
But America’s relationship with its allies in the region must evolve, he said, in the face of China’s ever-growing economic might and the “destabilizing” threat of a volatile North Korea.
“Our military capacity here has to be adjusted to a new threat,” Rubio said of the roughly 30,000 American military personnel stationed in South Korea.
“Much of our military standing here is still and was very largely based on the ability to slow down an invasion from the North long enough until reserves and supplements could get here,” he said. “And that still remains a threat to some extent. But the bigger threat now is that they’ve developed long-range missile capabilities, long-range artillery, anti-access, anti-ship weaponry, these are the sort of things. These are a different type of threat that now requires us to reposition a different kind of technology and capacity to the region.”
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