This bit of presidential campaign news nicely sums up the Republican Party’s foreign policy weaknesses:

The chairman of the House Benghazi Committee will join Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida on the 2016 campaign trail this week.

Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-South Carolina, will be traveling with Rubio on his campaign bus and attending town hall meetings in Iowa on Tuesday and Wednesday, according to Rubio’s campaign.

According to a report by conservative media outlet Townhall, Gowdy is expected to endorse Rubio.

The striking thing here is that Rubio is being endorsed by one of the House Republicans most obsessed with the 2012 attack in Benghazi, which came about as a consequence of the intervention in Libya that Rubio vocally supported. Here we have a snapshot of much of what is wrong with the GOP on foreign policy. We have the reflexive interventionist candidate who backed an unnecessary and illegal war, and we have the House member preoccupied with an attack that resulted from the same war who nonetheless ignores all of the relevant policy questions about how the U.S. intervened in a foreign conflict. If Gowdy represents Republican vacuity on foreign policy, Rubio represents the party’s pernicious hawkishness.

The fact that Gowdy would choose to endorse one of the loudest Republican supporters of the Libyan war rather than one of the candidates that opposed it at the time confirms that he doesn’t really care about policy substance or the consequences of bad policy decisions. If he did, he would back one of the candidates that warned that intervention would create an opening for the very jihadists in Libya that Gowdy has pretended to be so worried about. Instead, he is getting behind the one candidate left in the race whose position on Libya and whose foreign policy more generally are closest to Clinton’s. If Gowdy wants to advertise that the Benghazi obsession is driven almost entirely by a desire for partisan point-scoring divorced from serious consideration of our policy in Libya, he could hardly do better than endorsing Rubio for president.