Matt Purple commented on the foreign policy section of Tuesday’s debate:

I’ve commented to friends that I wouldn’t mind seeing a debate limited to Paul, Rubio and Fiorina, because they’re the only three who seem schooled on foreign policy. The biggest takeaway from last night is that it may be time to cross Rubio off the list. The Florida senator placed near the top and may very well win the Republican nomination, but his answers rarely strayed outside hoary talking points. After Paul challenged him on Syria, Rubio responded by babbling about Israel and then warning that “ISIS is in Libya.” Indeed they are! And the primary reason for that is the Obama administration’s overthrow of Moammar Gaddafi, which squashed any hope of restoring civil order in Libya. That operation was supported by a certain Florida senator because, as he put it back in 2011, “peaceful countries run by people that are in search of prosperity are not out there attacking the United States, are not out there harboring terrorists.” Today Libya is embroiled in chaos and swarming with Islamic State fighters.

That gives Fiorina too much credit, but I take Purple’s point. As I mentioned in my summary yesterday, Rubio’s debate answers were frequently nothing more than the canned lines that he has delivered on many other occasions. Many of his foreign policy remarks fit that description. After re-reading the transcript of the debate, I noticed that he really had nothing substantive to say about Russian involvement in Syria or U.S. policy there, nor did he state what his position on a “no-fly zone” in Syria is. As we know, he is very much in favor of imposing a “no-fly zone” there, and has gone as far as any candidate in explicitly threatening to shoot down Russian planes. During the debate, he opted to stick to safer “tough” rhetoric denouncing Putin as a “gangster” and whining about Western “weakness.”

Many people have justifiably criticized Carson for his meandering, ridiculous answer during this section of the debate, but it is worth noting that Rubio’s answer was only slightly more responsive to the question he was asked. Let’s review what Rubio said:

[Putin’s] calculation in the Middle East is that he has seen what this president has done, which is nothing, the president has no strategy, our allies in the region do not trust us. For goodness sake, there is only one pro-American free enterprise democracy in the Middle East, it is the state of Israel.

And we have a president that treats the prime minister of Israel with less respect than what he gives the ayatollah in Iran. And so our allies in the region don’t trust us.

Vladimir Putin is exploiting that weakness, for purposes of edging the Americans out as the most important geopolitical power broker in the region. And we do have a vested interest. And here’s why.

Because all those radical terrorist groups that, by the way, are not just in Syria and in Iraq, ISIS is now in Libya. They are a significant presence in Libya, and in Afghanistan, and a growing presence in Pakistan.

Soon they will be in Turkey. They will try Jordan. They will try Saudi Arabia. They are coming to us. They recruit Americans using social media. And they don’t hate us simply because we support Israel. They hate us because of our values. They hate us because our girls go to school. They hate us because women drive in the United States.

Either they win or we win, and we had better take this risk seriously, it is not going away on its own.

This was Rubio’s “contribution” to the debate about U.S. policy in Syria. In it, he misrepresents U.S. policy as doing “nothing,” throws in irrelevant “pro-Israel” pandering, lies about how the U.S. treats Israel and Iran, engages in general fear-mongering about jihadism, offers a goofy, ideological explanation for why jihadists hate Americans, and talks about the scale of the threat from jihadism in the most overwrought way possible. He repeats “our allies don’t trust us” twice, but it would be much more accurate to say that some of our clients are annoyed that we’re not doing everything they want. All of this is mashed together into an answer that conveys a lot of alarm and hawkishness, but not much more. The answer doesn’t tell us much of anything that we don’t know, and it does try to tell us several things that aren’t true. All of his statements here are very questionable, irrelevant, or flat-out wrong, or they reflect badly on his own foreign policy record, but he gets away with saying these things because he has an unearned reputation for foreign policy savvy.