Mario Loyola gushes over Marco Rubio‘s awful foreign policy speech:

Rubio believes that American leadership is indispensable, but he is at the same time an internationalist.

This isn’t a contrast between different things. If he believes that American “leadership” is indispensable, he is by definition an internationalist. There may be internationalists that aren’t hegemonists, but there are no hegemonists that aren’t internationalists. What Loyola is trying to say is that Rubio prefers unilateral U.S. action, but accepts that cooperating with other states can sometimes be useful. Like other hegemonists, Rubio has no problem with multilateralism so long as it is in the form of U.S.-led coalitions, but he cannot stand any form of multilateralism that might get in the way of starting wars or intervening in other nations’ conflicts.

Loyola likes it when Rubio talks about counter-balancing regional powers:

Virtually all the countries on China’s periphery look to the U.S. to counterbalance its rise. But doing so requires actively defending international norms of long-standing and widespread acceptance, such as freedom of the seas. That means being willing to confront the Chinese navy in the Yellow Sea when China seeks to exclude our navy from its “Exclusive Economic Zone” under the Law of the Sea treaty [bold mine-DL].

The area in question is the South China Sea. The Yellow Sea is something else. Geographical confusion isn’t the only problem here. Wrapping up a confrontational policy in rhetoric about “freedom of the seas” isn’t smart, and it’s also unnecessary since China depends on the freedom of navigation for its overseas commerce. Confronting China in this way is needlessly provocative, and it is likely to produce new incidents that might one day conceivably trigger a conflict. There shouldn’t be any willingness to “confront” China’s navy in what China would consider its territorial waters.

Notice what else is lacking in Loyola’s statement? Any discussion of how it serves U.S. interests to counter-balance China in its own region. I’m sure that China’s neighbors would like the U.S. to do this, but it is simply taken for granted that the U.S. ought to bear the costs and the risks involved. This U.S. role is simply making the region safe for the mercantilism of the states in the region, which is hardly to the advantage of the United States.