Source: United States Senator for Florida Marco Rubio
U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) joined State of the Union to discuss the Chinese spy balloon. See below for highlights and watch the full interview here.
On intelligence gained by monitoring and recovering the Chinese spy balloon:
“We won’t know that till we get into a secure setting this week in Washington. And probably most of that is something we won’t be able to disclose in any great detail.
“I don’t think the technology or the existence of these things is a great mystery. I think what’s embedded here is a clear message. It’s not a coincidence that this happens leading up to the State of the Union address, leading up to Blinken’s visit to China. The Chinese knew that this was going to be spotted. They knew that we were going to have to react to it. They flew it over military installations and sensitive sites. And the message embedded in this to the world is, ‘we can fly a balloon over airspace of the United States of America, and they won’t be able to do anything about it to stop us.’”
On past Chinese spy balloon incursions into U.S. airspace:
“The existence of the balloons is not a mystery to people. What we’ve never seen, what is unprecedented, is a balloon flight that entered over Idaho and flew over Montana over all of these sensitive military installations, Air Force bases, ICBM fields, right across the middle of the country. That has never happened before. That is unprecedented. We’ve never seen this, so this is no comparison to anything that may have happened up to this point.”
On the future of U.S.-China relations:
“The broader relationship between the US and China to anyone who has any doubts about it is clear. China has been for some time, and will be, the primary strategic adversary of the United States. We should be focused on it because what they’re trying to do is create a world in which they are the most powerful nation and the United States is a great power in decline. That is what they believe to be the case. That is what they are working on. And we have to determine whether we’re going to allow the world to head in that direction or not.
“Then there’s all sorts of things we need to do, from how we’re postured militarily in the Indo-Pacific all the way to what kind of companies do we allow to operate in the United States and spy on us because we’ve invited them in, because they’re in our infrastructure and our telecommunications infrastructure, because they’re buying land, because they’re buying farmland, because because they’re wiping out key industrial capabilities of this country. There’s all kinds of things that need to be discussed when it comes to China, because this is the issue of the 21st century.”