Marco Rubio, Secretary of State
Joint Base Andrews
SECRETARY RUBIO: We’ve got to be quick, guys.
QUESTION: Mr. Secretary, what’s your message going to be in Munich?
SECRETARY RUBIO: Well, you’ve got to wait till Saturday. Right, Saturday? It’ll be good. It will be good. I think it will be well received. We’ll see.
QUESTION: What do you think the Europeans are hoping to hear? Something more conciliatory than last year?
SECRETARY RUBIO: I think they want – honestly, they want to know where we’re going, where we’d like to go, where we’d like to go with them. So that’s our hope. It’s an important conference, my third time, twice as Secretary of State. We’ll have a lot of members of Congress here, so – as well. I’ll see them tomorrow as well.
So it’s important, and I think it’s at a defining moment, and I refer you back to even the speech or the statement I gave during my nomination hearing as Secretary of State. The world is changing very fast right in front of us. The old world is gone – frankly, the world that I grew up in – and we live in a new era in geopolitics, and it’s going to require all of us to sort of reexamine what that looks like and what our role is going to be. And it’s – we’ve had many of these conversations in private with many of our allies, and they are our allies, and we need to continue to have those conversations. And I think Saturday, hopefully, and the meetings we’ll have there will move us in that direction.
QUESTION: Do you think Greenland will be at issue, or are you going to talk about it, or is that a done deal —
SECRETARY RUBIO: Greenland?
QUESTION: Yeah, Greenland.
SECRETARY RUBIO: Oh, I’m sure somebody will raise it.
QUESTION: Sure.
SECRETARY RUBIO: We’re working on that. We feel good about it.
QUESTION: Do you expect to meet with President Zelenskyy when you’re there?
SECRETARY RUBIO: I think so. I think he was going to be there, and there’s a chance to see him. I believe it’s on my schedule. I’m not 100 percent certain, but I’m sure we will.
QUESTION: What do you think about the Russian bombardment during all of this cold and —
SECRETARY RUBIO: It’s terrible. It’s a war. That’s why we want the war to end. People are suffering. It’s the coldest time of year. It’s unimaginable suffering. That’s the problem with wars. That’s why wars are bad, and that’s why we have worked so hard for over a year now to try to bring this one to an end.
QUESTION: Why the meeting with Orban? Are you looking to help him in the polls?
SECRETARY RUBIO: Sorry? Meeting with?
QUESTION: With Viktor Orban.
SECRETARY RUBIO: Well, the President said he’s very supportive of him, and so are we, but obviously we were going to do that visit as a bilateral visit. They came to the U.S. earlier, last year, late last year. We told them that when I had an opportunity I would visit, and this is the best opportunity. It’s very close by. We’re also going to go by Slovakia, which – which we met with them at the end of last year in Florida, or early this year – I forget – during the holidays. So we also told them we’d go by. So it just made sense to sort of tack it onto this trip.
QUESTION: So this is going to be your third transatlantic trip in the last week.
SECRETARY RUBIO: It is? Oh, because —
QUESTION: Third time crossing the Atlantic, right?
SECRETARY RUBIO: Yeah, that’s right.
QUESTION: And then a fourth on the way back.
SECRETARY RUBIO: And then I’ve got a fourth time on the way back, yeah.
QUESTION: So is there a message here for Europe, or is it just basically, well, I went to the Olympics and now I’m doing —
SECRETARY RUBIO: Message?
QUESTION: To Europe, like we’re not disengaged?
SECRETARY RUBIO: Well, I don’t know, guys. I mean, I didn’t schedule the Olympics and I didn’t schedule Munich. They’re on our schedule. You know those are preexisting events. We went to both. Europe’s important to us. We’re very tightly linked to Europe. I think most people in this country can trace both their cultural or their personal heritage back to Europe, so we’re deeply tied to Europe and our future (inaudible). So we’ve just got to talk about what that future looks like.
All right? All right, guys.
QUESTION: Are you going to urge Russia – I’m sorry —
SECRETARY RUBIO: I’m not going to Russia this week, no.
QUESTION: Slovakia and Hungary – are you going to urge Hungary and Slovakia to stop buying Russian energy?
SECRETARY RUBIO: Well, we’ll have those conversations with them. We’ll talk to them about what needs to happen.
QUESTION: (Inaudible.)
SECRETARY RUBIO: Yeah, I’m not going to get into what we’re going to say in those meetings. But more than anything else, these are countries that are very strong with us, very cooperative with the United States, work very closely with us. And it was a good opportunity to go see them and two countries I’ve never been in.
So all right, guys.
QUESTION: Thank you.
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