We at the Council on Foreign Relations had a conference call with Senator Marco Rubio yesterday. Ever the centrist, I was thinking I might be pleasantly surprised by a few of Rubio’s foreign policy insights. I certainly don’t agree with him on many domestic issues. This guy could well be President of the United States some day, however, so what he says matters. Please, I’m not inviting the predictable partisan ranting here by either of the two wings. My point is that with this audience, at least, Rubio had an opportunity to move momentarily away from the customary red-meat-tossing, faux-machismo and Manichaean nonsense and speak in thoughtful, even-handed and, yes, Presidential terms to the vast majority of us in the middle. He failed to do so.
Sure, I agreed with him on some matters. But, predictably, every foreign policy and national security challenge he identified – what he generalized as the “broader unraveling of the global order,” as if that claim is something new – was the unadulterated fault of the other party and every solution he proffered involved tough talk, threats of military force and calls for spending vastly more on national defense. He claimed without substantiation, for example, that the U.S. Navy is at “pre-World War I levels.” Really? I don’t expect it from the whack jobs, but serious candidates like Rubio, Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton need to take a break once in a while from the huffing and puffing of base-building campaign bluster and show us the right stuff as our potential Commanders-in-Chief. It's that important.
