Marco Rubio has desperately backtracked on a petty revenge plot reportedly cooked up by the Trump administration.
President Donald Trump, rankled by the United Kingdom’s lack of support for his war in Iran, was reportedly considering re-evaluating the United States’s position on its traditional ally’s claim over the Falkland Islands, a self-governing British Overseas Territory in the South Atlantic, where King Charles is head of state.
This slight was revealed in a leaked Pentagon memo that dropped on the eve of the Monarch’s visit to the U.S. earlier this week. But Rubio, ever the statesman, now insists it was much ado about nothing.
King Charles III, Queen Camilla, President Donald Trump, and First Lady Melania Trump are pictured at the White House on the final day of the King and Queen’s state visit on Thursday. / Samir Hussein / via REUTERS
“It was just an email. People are getting overexcited by an email. It was just an email with some ideas,” the secretary of state and potential 2028 presidential candidate told British broadsheet The Telegraph before the King’s visit.
The paper also reported that British Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper collared Rubio on the issue in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday.
However, his statement marks a walkback from the strong rhetoric from the Pentagon, which, after the note dropped, didn’t rule out a reconsideration of D.C.’s position on the Falklands. Spokesperson Kingsley Wilson said the Department of Defense “will ensure that the president has credible options to ensure that our allies are no longer a paper tiger and instead do their part.”
Encyclopaedia Britannica / Universal Images Group via Getty
The memo, initially reported on by Reuters, suggested that the Trump administration could side with Argentina on the argument. Buenos Aires takes a dim view of British claims to the archipelago, which it calls Las Malvinas.
Indeed, Argentina’s president, Trump ally Javier Milei, encouraged the largely British-identifying islanders known as Kelpers to “go home” to the U.K. In the last referendum, in 2013, 99.8 percent of the islanders voted to remain a part of the U.K.
The Telegraph reported that the memo was “thought to have been” drafted by a junior staffer at the Defense Department. “Just an email” or not, it caused uproar in the U.K., whose Army went to war with Argentina over the islands in 1982.
It is understood that Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom, Yvette Cooper, pulled Rubio on the issue. / Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images
Sir Ed Davey, the leader of the U.K.’s Liberal Democrats, even called for King Charles’ state visit to the U.S. to be canceled altogether as a result.
The visit went ahead without any major hitch and appeared to heal, at least temporarily, the rift between U.S. and U.K. leadership.
A U.S. State Department spokesman adopted a more diplomatic tone than the Pentagon did on Thursday, stating that the official U.S. position is “one of neutrality.”
“We acknowledge that there are conflicting claims of sovereignty between Argentina and the U.K. We recognize de facto United Kingdom administration of the islands but take no position regarding sovereignty claims of either party,” the statement added.