Some reactions to Rubio’s war-mongering speech.
It is also very clear that Rubio was aiming his remarks partly at Ron Paul and Rand Paul, who have successfully built a small bloc of conservative Republicans who have grown skeptical of using America’s military to fix any and all problems on planet earth. “I recently joked that today, in the U.S. Senate, on foreign policy, if you go far enough to the right, you wind up on the left,” he said.
Rubio’s speech is a remarkable political document. It shows that some Senators have learned nothing from the past decade.
John Quincy Adams’ declaration that America goes not “abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” says Rubio, is an idea that he rejects.
A wiser guide, said the senator, is Bob Kagan, Barack Obama’s favorite neocon, who calls it a myth that America is in decline and who urges a more robust and interventionist foreign policy.
Rubio says that on arrival in the Senate, he was astonished to find conservative colleagues advocating “withdrawal from Afghanistan and staying out of Libya.”
“Today in the U.S. Senate, on foreign policy, if you go far enough to the right, you wind up on the left,” Rubio joked.
But is it leftist for senators, after 10 years of fighting two wars, with 6,500 dead, 40,000 wounded, $2 trillion sunk and a harvest of hatred reaped, to think that perhaps it may not have been wise to plunge into Mesopotamia and the Hindu Kush?
Rubio’s target is obvious: Ron Paul, Rand Paul, and those elements of the Tea Party Right that dissented on Libya. Given that it barely scraped 20 percent in most primaries, it’s amazing how much the Paulite revolt seems to have upset the Republican establishment. In fact, Rubio’s entire speech (and it’s a long one) reads like a step-by-step rebuttal of the Paulite critique of neoconservative foreign policy – the belief that America has a moral duty and a strategic interest to promote global democracy…
Apparently, if some goatherd in the mountains of Afghanistan loses one of his flock to a landmine, the consequences for Topeka, Kansas could be terrible. The absurdity of the theory that literally every security problem in the world is a direct threat to the United States is but one example of Rubio’s naïveté. In his vision, America never makes mistakes and everyone loves it. Small nations regard the US as their protector against bigger nations, whose wickedness is irrational: “Other countries look apprehensively on the growing influence of newly emerging powers in their midst, and look to the U.S. to counterbalance them.”
