"Good God, I hope this guy never gets anywhere near running U.S. foreign policy," I thought to myself. It was 2015 and I just heard then-Senator Marco Rubio address the Council on Foreign Relations. I immediately published a blog piece expressing serious concern about a guy ("Huffing and Puffing," May 14, 2015) who seemed several pounds shy of an empty suit.
Rubio was running for President against a name-calling blight who dubbed him “Little Marco.” Rubio’s foreign-policy prescriptions were naïve, simplistic, ill-founded, and seemingly without serious knowledge of U.S. foreign-policy history. His opinions were the typical red-meat, pseudo-macho claptrap in which every problem has a military solution.
Of course, Rubio is Secretary of State today and his boss is the aforementioned name-calling hack. To make matters worse, that hack has ceded vast foreign-policy duties to real-estate lawyer and investor Steven Witkoff who has not one minute of experience in any of it. What's worse is that Witkoff has the standard-issue, over-inflated ego shared by many men in that crowd that foes and adversaries love to exploit.
The results to date from this ill-equipped, ill-informed troika have been painful. Things will get much worse, too, as our enemies take great comfort in such monstrous moronity. Welcome to the minor leagues.