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Rubio and the Coalition Against ISIS

Rubio would find that our allies and clients are even less willing to risk taking casualties in a ground war, and his "multinational coalition" would also be one in name only.
marco rubio

As Dan Drezner notes, there wasn’t much new or interesting in the president’s speech last night. Obama’s hawkish critics likewise had little of value to add in their attacks on the speech. One of Rubio’s complaints stood out as an especially odd one for him to make:

He honestly believes that there is a coalition fighting against ISIS. This is absurd. There is no such coalition. A lot of countries that have put their names on a piece of paper.

It’s true that the administration’s claims of a “broad coalition” have been exaggerated all along, and those claims have become even harder to take seriously as many of the nominal coalition members have withdrawn even their token contributions from the bombing campaign. This is nonetheless an odd line of attack for Rubio to use. He is practically the only presidential candidate to endorse the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen that has diverted the resources of the Gulf states away from the fight against ISIS. If there’s not really a coalition against ISIS, that is partly due to the U.S.-backed war in Yemen that Rubio supports.

There is also something very strange about Rubio complaining about the lack of multilateral support for a war when he is the one always touting the importance of U.S. “indispensability” and “leadership.” According to his standards, it should be no problem for him that the U.S. is the one doing the vast majority of the work in the bombing campaign. The absence of meaningful international support shouldn’t bother him very much, either. He is citing the lack of a real coalition against ISIS because he thinks it undermines the president, but all that it does is underscore that the war on ISIS has been and will continue to be one dominated by the U.S. It’s odd for him to draw attention to this because it confirms that his own plan for the war is much more dangerous and costly for the U.S. than he would like to admit.

Rubio has said that he wants to “build a multinational coalition of countries willing to send troops into Iraq and Syria,” but that’s hard to believe. If there isn’t even a coalition of states willing to contribute significantly to a bombing campaign, why would Rubio be more successful in assembling a coalition willing to send in ground forces? Rubio would find that our allies and clients are even less willing to risk taking casualties in a ground war, and his “multinational coalition” would also be one in name only. Like Obama’s coalition rhetoric, Rubio’s talk of building a “multinational coalition” is the nonsense that war supporters have to indulge in to make it seem as if the costs of the war are going to widely distributed rather than being borne mostly by the U.S. Pointing out that Obama’s coalition talk is absurd exposes Rubio’s promise to build a coalition against ISIS as the empty rhetoric that it is.

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