Greg Scoblete reaches much the same conclusion about Rubio’s latest foreign policy address that I have:

In fact, the most curious thing of all about Rubio’s foreign policy speech – which Marc Thiessen hailed as a “clear foreign policy vision”- is its lack of substance. There is no mention of Europe’s sovereign debt crisis (which, in case you haven’t noticed, is having a rather direct impact on the U.S. economy) and outside of the reference above, there is absolutely no mention of China or the rise of Asia and what U.S. policy should be in response. Rubio isn’t a presidential candidate, so maybe it’s unreasonable to expect anything other than Wilsonian boilerplate, but it’s certainly not a “clear” vision of anything.

I have followed Rubio on foreign policy since he was a candidate, and I have found that he doesn’t offer much except for “Wilsonian boilerplate” and party-line whining about how everything Obama has done has been too slow or insufficiently aggressive. He spends a lot of time in this new speech running through a Santorumesque check-list of governments he doesn’t like. He insists on treating them as intolerable threats, he makes a lot of broad claims about how America must fulfill its “rightful role” as hegemon, and he refuses to consider any meaningful cuts in military spending.

Most of all, he’s predictably unsatisfied with almost everything the administration has done or not done. Rubio’s complaint about delayed free trade agreements is probably the least persuasive. Rubio doesn’t even pretend that these agreements will do much of anything to benefit the U.S. There is no mention of the merits of these agreements, which are simply taken for granted because they are dubbed “free trade” agreements. Rubio argues that they should be passed so that we “stand with our allies,” as if that were sufficient reason for endorsing a trade deal.

It is grimly amusing to see him hold up Reagan’s grudging, belated abandonment of Marcos as an example of “morality in foreign policy” in action. The most annoying thing about this speech is that it tries to conflate hostility to detente with support for democratization in the Reagan administration. One constant theme in Reagan’s attacks on Carter was that he was too accommodating to the Soviets and too hard on authoritarian allies, and for most of his time in office Reagan did not follow Carter’s example in pressing allied governments to reform or make concessions to their domestic opposition. If Rubio thinks that Obama has been hesitant and slow to support democratic protesters overseas, he would have found the waiting for Reagan’s support to be excruciating.

Rubio also rehearses unproven claims about the security benefits of global democratization as if they were gospel. He presents an updated version of Karl Rove’s risible claim that “we were not involved in the world before 9/11, and look what happened.” Rubio said:

Now some suggest that America should heed the famous words of John Quincy Adams and go “not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.” The problem is if America turns inward and ignores the monsters abroad, they are likely to come here.

I assume that Rubio knows that America was not turning inward during the 1990s. The 1990s were a period of hyperactivity abroad. This is just an amazingly dishonest claim by Rubio, especially as it relates to the 9/11 attacks. He is essentially saying, “If we aren’t constantly meddling all over the world, we will be attacked.” Of all the bad arguments for global hegemony, this has to be one of the worst. It treats excessive entanglement in world affairs and military overstretch as necessities for both the U.S. and the world, and they are nothing of the kind.

Perhaps the least tenable claim Rubio makes in the entire speech comes near the end when he says that “freedom cannot survive without us,” meaning that the U.S. cannot reduce its commitments at all without jeopardizing “freedom.” It can’t possibly be the responsibility of the United States or our government to ensure the continued survival of freedom all over the world, and it’s more than a little arrogant to insist that “we” are essential to preserving freedom worldwide. If freedom cannot survive without us, that would seem to suggest that it may not be this universally-demanded thing that all nations yearn to have. If freedom cannot survive without us, that doesn’t say very much for all of the nations that belong to what Rubio called “freedom’s domain.” Of course, the long-term survival of freedom in other countries depends entirely on the people in those countries, and Rubio vastly exaggerates the need for U.S. involvement in the world to make this possible.