Marco Rubio with a microphone in his hand during an event in 2021. Photo: Michael Badon/file photo.
By Brian Berletic – Feb 2, 2025
While a recent interview with the newly confirmed US Secretary of State Marco Rubio began with promising slogans, it quickly unraveled into threats of overt aggression, including outright calls to seize the Panama Canal and annex Greenland from Denmark under an implicit threat of military force.
While the change in presidential administration is purely superficial, the intense urgency it pursues continuity of agenda with is not. It reflects the rapid rise of China, Russian resilience in the face of US proxy war in Ukraine, and an expanding multipolar world overwriting the US-led unipolar world order at ever-increasing speeds.
Secretary Rubio: Seizing Panama and annexing Greenland, all aimed at China
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a recent interview with Megyn Kelly, the transcript of which was published on the US State Department’s official website, began with a discussion about the end of the “unipolar world” and US foreign policy moving forward.
Secretary Rubio would first note:
“…it’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power. That was not – that was an anomaly. It was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually, you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet. We face that now with China and to some extent, Russia, and then you have rogue states like Iran and North Korea you have to deal with.
So now more than ever, we need to remember that foreign policy should always be about furthering the national interest of the United States and doing so, to the extent possible, avoiding war and armed conflict, which we have seen two times in the last century be very costly.”
At face value, this first appears to be a sober, rational, and even welcomed approach to US foreign policy – the realization that the pursuit of US primacy is unsustainable and that the US must accept a multipolar world. Moreover, it appears to suggest that the US’ pursuit of a place within this emerging multipolar world should be done “avoiding war and armed conflict.”
The problem, of course, is upon closer inspection of Secretary Rubio’s words throughout the rest of the interview, it becomes clear that the avoidance of war is predicated not on compromises the US is willing to make to find a constructive place for itself within this multipolar world, but instead on the compromises the US expects nations like Russia and China to make for the US to avoid any sort of compromise or concession at all.
At one point during the interview, Secretary Rubio insists: “China wants to be the most powerful country in the world, and they want to do so at our expense, and that’s not in our national interest, and we’re going to address it. We don’t want a war over it, but we’re going to address it.”
And it is true. China will rise at the expense of the US – but only because the US is unable to justify or maintain its continued and unwarranted influence worldwide except through the threat of coercion, interference, and outright political or military capture.
During the interview, Secretary Rubio indicated that the Panama Canal will be among the first targets of US aggression under the Trump administration, outright stating the objective is for the US to once again administer the canal, opened 111 years ago and handed over to Panama in 1999.
Secretary Rubio, echoing recent claims made by President Trump, said: “A few years ago, Panama made the decision that they were going to de-recognize Taiwan and align with Beijing. And with that came all sorts of money that was provided to the then president’s administration to – for projects and things of that nature, but also Chinese investment. And one of the main investments they have is in these two port facilities on both – on the entry – on both sides of the canal. And all kinds of other infrastructure, cranes and the like.”
From this, Secretary Rubio leaps to: “…if China wanted to obstruct traffic in the Panama Canal, they could. That’s a fact. And it’s my view that’s a violation of the treaty agreement, and that’s what President Trump is raising, and we’re going to address that topic.”
It should be pointed out that Panama’s decision to “de-recognize Taiwan and align with Beijing” reflects what Washington itself recognizes as the “one China policy,” in which nations and the UN recognize there is one China, Taiwan is part of China, and that there is one legitimate government of China – the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in Beijing. Panama had only recognized the “Republic of China” (ROC) in Taipei under US pressure. Its decision to adopt a one China policy inline with international law indicates weakening US influence over Panama and offers another clue as to why the US seeks to reassert control over the Central American nation.
No details were given as to how Chinese-based companies operating ports at either end of the canal could in fact “obstruct traffic in the Panama Canal” itself, or how the US government’s administration of the canal would affect the port facilities which are separate from the actual canal.
Secretary Rubio would dive even deeper into the topic, claiming:
Hong Kong-based companies having control over the entry and exit points of the canal is completely unacceptable. That cannot continue. Because of the – and if there’s a conflict and China tells them, do everything you can to obstruct the canal so that the U.S. can’t engage in trade and commerce, so that the U.S. military and naval fleet cannot get to the Indo-Pacific fast enough, they would have to do it. They would have to do it, and they would do it. And now we’d have a major problem on our hands. That’s number one.
Number two, we have to talk about the fact that we built this thing. We paid for it. Thousands of people died doing this – Americans. And somehow our naval vessels who go through there, and American shipping that goes through there, pays rates in some cases higher than other countries are paying – for example, a vessel from China. That’s also not acceptable. It was a terrible deal when it was made, it should never have been allowed. They’re going to tell you that it’s set by an independent administrative entity and not the government; that’s their internal problem. They’ll have to figure that out. But we should not be in a position of having to pay more than other countries. In fact, we should be getting a discount or maybe for free because we paid for the thing.
The problem for Secretary Rubio and the special interests he serves, is that indeed a deal – however Secretary Rubio feels about it – was made. The treaties signed regarding the Panama Canal and Panama’s sovereignty over it cannot simply be reversed suddenly because the US no longer finds them favorable.
The US did indeed build the canal. But it chose to build it over a thousand miles from its own borders on the territory of another nation 111 years ago. That nation rightfully assumed control over the canal a quarter of a century ago and has the right to administer the canal in any way it wants, even if Washington perceives it as “unfair” or otherwise detrimental to its interests.
China’s ability to invest in ports, bridges, and other infrastructure at either end of the canal is owed to America’s own disinterest in doing so. These ports, bridges, and other infrastructure projects just as easily could have been American investments, if that was how the US still interacted with other nations.
Instead, the US interacts in an entirely different manner – through coercion, interference, political capture and outright military invasion. The US has already once invaded Panama and seized the canal over the course of December 1989 and January 1990, just 9 years before the canal was fully handed over to Panama, likewise on grounds that the canal’s neutrality was being “violated.”
Secretary Rubio’s declared intent to once again violate Washington’s own treaty with Panama and trample the nation’s security, sovereignty, and territorial integrity is as much a threat to global peace and stability in reality as Secretary Rubio baselessly accuses China of in fiction.
This represents a microcosm of exactly how the US seeks to prevent China from rising at America’s expense – or more accurately – at the expense of America’s unwarranted primacy beyond its borders.
Greenland was another target of US aggression mentioned by Secretary Rubio.
Secretary Rubio explained:
…the Arctic Circle and the Arctic region is going to become critical for shipping lanes, for how you get some of this energy that’s going to be produced under President Trump – these energies rely on shipping lanes. The Arctic has some of the most valuable shipping lanes in the world. As some of the ice is melting, it’s become more and more navigable. We need to be able to defend that.
So if you project what the Chinese have done, it is just a matter of time before – because they are not an Arctic power. They do not have an Arctic presence, so they need to be able to have somewhere that they can stage from. And it is completely realistic to believe that the Chinese will eventually – maybe even in the short term – try to do in Greenland what they have done at the Panama Canal and in other places, and that is install facilities that give them access to the Arctic with the cover of a Chinese company but that in reality serve a dual purpose: that in a moment of conflict, they could send naval vessels to that facility and operate from there. And that is completely unacceptable to the national security of the world and to the United – to the security of the world and the national security of the United States.
Again, Secretary Rubio is talking about seizing control of another nation’s territory because of hypothetical threats he claims China could pose in the future, but also because of Greenland’s value to US interests.
Because the US itself has already agreed with Denmark to aid in the defense of Greenland, Secretary Rubio concludes:
If we’re already on the hook for having to do that, then why – we might as well have more control over what happens there.
None of Secretary Rubio’s explanations over either the Panama Canal or Greenland is backed by international law. In fact, America’s intent toward both stands in direct contravention of international law.
When asked about President Trump’s refusal to rule out military force in annexing Greenland, Secretary Rubio admitted this was meant to keep leverage on the table – implying the US would use everything up to and including the threat of military force to acquire Greenland if Denmark refused.
Annexation over persuasion
Since the end of the Cold War, the US has had no obligation to offer anything to nations it exercised control over, owed to a lack of alternatives. In Panama, for example, if a government obstructed US interests even within Panama’s own borders, the US could simply remove the government from power. If a government resisted regime change, the US would, and in fact has militarily invaded, overthrown the government in power and replaced it with an obedient client regime.
With the rise of China and China’s eagerness to offer nations around the world constructive alternatives to Washington’s one-way relationships, nations like Panama now have options. Unlike China, the US is unable to offer port modernization, bridges, and other infrastructure projects – infrastructure projects the US is failing to invest in even back at home.
In the absence of America’s ability to provide a more compelling offer than China to nations around the globe, the US is simply and openly seeking to annex key territory and infrastructure rather than have the nations this territory and infrastructure actually belong to pivot toward a closer relationship with China.
Despite repeatedly claiming China poses a “grave threat” to US interests, with many assuming this means an actual national security threat to the US, in reality, China only poses a threat to America’s ability to exercise unwarranted primacy over other nations abroad.
The other alternative would be for the US to accept a rational and constructive place among the nations of an emerging multipolar world even Secretary Rubio admits is taking shape, forfeiting primacy over all other nations.
Unfortunately, Secretary Rubio and the special interests he represents still deeply believe in their own sense of superiority and the impunity they believe that entitles them to. Secretary Rubio can deny US foreign policy seeks out war, but he has clearly laid out a course of action that depends on other nations subordinating their sovereignty under international law to US interests in order to actually avoid that war.
Brian Berletic
Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer who hosts The New Atlas; former US marine officer. For over ten years he wrote under the pseudonym 'Tony Cartalucci.'
