.. Instead of real vision—an incisive analysis of the world today and actual solutions to its complex challenges—Rubio offers attitudes and platitudes. Scratch the surface and it is difficult to identify a single major new idea or overarching strategy beyond reversing what President Obama has done, shifting the tone toward more forthright condemnation of authoritarians with whom the Obama administration has sought pragmatic and targeted cooperation, and projecting “strength” through a more confrontational approach backed by military spending.
.. But then the political winds shifted. The rise of ISIS, the invasion of Crimea, and the mass migration of refugees created a narrative of fear. And Rubio tacked right.
His Republican opponents can’t get to the right of Trump on any of these issues—and they can’t constructively debate him—because he has barely thought through the details. This drives other Republicans crazy, in the same way that Ronald Reagan’s seemingly fanciful call for a Strategic Defense Initiative—dubbed “Star Wars” in the press—drove his opponents crazy.
.. Since arriving in the Senate, in 2011, Rubio has gradually become one of the most hawkish members of the Republican Party. His policies now align closely with the chamber’s leading Wilsonians, Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who have long argued that the United States should spread democracy in the Middle East, sometimes at the barrel of a gun
.. While Rubio is an uber-hawk, Cruz is now his party’s leading skeptic of American interventions; he’s not as firm as Rand Paul, but he’s become much more prominent. On Tuesday, Cruz outlined in some detail his case against the interventionism of the Rubio-McCain-Graham wing, saying that Egypt and Libya were better off with the secular dictators that previously ruled those countries, and—more surprisingly—that Bashar al-Assad, who is responsible for hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, should remain in power. “If we topple Assad, the result will be ISIS will take over Syria, and it will worsen U.S. national security interests,” he said. “Instead of being a Woodrow Wilson democracy promoter, we ought to hunt down our enemies and kill ISIS rather than creating opportunities for ISIS to take control of new countries.”
With help from an allied group that is airing television ads in Iowa, Mr. Rubio is seeking to raise doubts on the right about Mr. Cruz’s toughness on national security — a potentially fatal vulnerability, should Mr. Rubio succeed, amid heightened concerns about terrorism. More quietly, he is trying to muddy the perception that Mr. Cruz is a hard-liner on immigration, asserting that Mr. Cruz supports “legalizing people that are in this country illegally.”
.. Their stances on core policy issues are actually quite similar: Each toes the conservative line on taxes, abortion and guns. But they are making the most of where they diverge: Mr. Rubio’s more moderate posture on immigration, and Mr. Cruz’s effort to chart a middle course on national security between hawks like Mr. Rubio and more libertarian-minded Republicans like Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky.
.. And they are working to sow doubts about Mr. Cruz’s convictions on immigration, an issue on which Mr. Rubio is vulnerable because of his leadership role in the failed effort to push through legislation that would have offered a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Aides to Mr. Rubio have quietly pushed reporters to question Mr. Cruz about how he defines amnesty — an effort to undermine Mr. Cruz with hard-liners by exposing his unwillingness to call for mass deportations.
.. Mr. Rubio, though, has a very different view of how the campaign is to be won. While he is stepping up his appearances in the early nominating states, his aides believe that garnering positive news coverage, especially in the widely viewed debates, is most crucial to early success, which then begets subsequent wins.
.. “More people in Iowa see Marco on ‘Fox and Friends’ than see Marco when he is in Iowa. Of course, that doesn’t mean you don’t go to Iowa.”
Rubio is a kind of crusader for global Americanism, a believer that our foreign policy should consist of championing the right (as we see it) and opposing anyone who doesn’t line up behind us, and always doubling down on our commitments. The true insanity of this ideology in practice is manifest in his recent piece on how to defeat ISIS, which calls for first defeating ISIS’s strongest opponents, Russia, Iran and the Assad regime, so that the deck can be cleared for America to battle ISIS without accidentally siding with anyone who hasn’t already won an American commitment to their defense.
.. Trump wins applause for saying we should cheer Russia on for attacking ISIS rather than getting in their way or trying to take over. But he also wins applause for saying we should seize ISIS’s oil and kill their families. There are common threads between the more restrained and the extremely aggressive stances: in both cases, we’re talking about somebody attacking ISIS, and in neither case is there any real concern for a strategic endgame.
The rising dispensation on the right is interesting in demonstrating that American can win – and that it doesn’t really care who else has to lose in the process.