Dan Drezner is pleasantly surprised by Rubio’s proposals for countering Russia:

If you’re concerned about a President Rubio acting too hawkish, however, then… well, this is kind of encouraging. In a campaign where other candidates are proposing all kinds of crazy foreign policy stuff, this is exactly the kind of cheap saber-rattling that sounds good to the untrained ear but probably wouldn’t worsen what are already bad situations in Ukraine and the Middle East.

It’s true that Rubio doesn’t make any extremely reckless proposals in his latest essay, but that doesn’t say much for the proposals that he has made. More important, Rubio’s call for more aggressive measures in both Ukraine and Syria reflects his instinct to push for more confrontation whenever possible. I would also note that the same candidate who proudly boasts elsewhere of his desire to scrap the nuclear deal as quickly as possible is not as savvy on foreign policy as he would like everyone to believe he is.

It’s possible that sending arms to Ukraine wouldn’t jeopardize the fragile cease-fire there, but it seems more likely that it would. Rubio’s recommendations don’t ever seem to come from a careful weighing of the potential risks and benefits of a course of action, but rather always come from an ideological imperative to get “tough” with whichever regimes he has in his sights. If Rubio’s bad answer for Ukraine is more sanctions and more weapons, his answer for Syria is even more misguided. Despite the obvious failure of the administration’s attempts to arm a “moderate” Syrian opposition, Rubio wants to persist in that folly and he wants to use the non-existent “moderate” opposition to fight ISIS and Assad at the same time:

We must work with moderate elements of the opposition and step up training of rebels to fight not only ISIS but also Assad.

His ire isn’t limited just to Russia, but extends to any country that cooperates in allowing Russian planes to fly through their airspace to get to Syria:

Countries surrounding Syria that enable these actions by allowing Russian military overflights also need to know there will be a price for enabling Putin’s expansionism.

Calling Russian actions in Syria “expansionism” is misleading at best, and in his eagerness to block this so-called “expansionism” he is prepared to sour U.S. relations with other states as well. He doesn’t spell out what the “price” will be, but he is calling for punitive measures of some kind against several other governments in the region, including that of Iraq, in a crude attempt to bully them into doing Washington’s bidding. That pressure would put the Iraqi government in a very difficult position, and it is unlikely to yield the results that Rubio wants, but then as we’ve seen in the case of Cuba Rubio isn’t known for backing policies based on their results.

Rubio insists on countering Russian actions in Syria, but at no point does he clearly explain why the U.S. should waste resources and effort in trying to counter those actions. He remains wedded to the goal of regime change in Syria, but doesn’t think through the consequences of pursuing that goal. As relatively modest as they might seem, Rubio’s proposals would potentially put the U.S. on a collision course with Russia in two ongoing conflicts. When he sees a foreign conflict, he looks for ways to escalate it and to increase U.S. involvement in it, and he does so regardless of the changing circumstances in those conflicts. That doesn’t sound very savvy to me.