Earlier this month, Marco Rubio gave his first floor speech as a U.S. Senator. Ross described it as “a paean to national greatness,” which I suppose it was, and it is entirely in keeping with the hawkish interventionist line Rubio has been pushing since last year as a candidate. Since coming to the Senate, Rubio has become the retiring Joe Lieberman’s appointed heir and successor as the most recklessly ideological militarist in Congress, which he confirmed again with the joint op-ed he wrote with Lieberman on the Libyan war earlier this week. We need to approach Rubio’s speech with this in mind, because it is very important that we recognize Rubio’s anti-declinism as an implicit call for continual, unending conflict with the rest of the world. Like John McCain, Rubio promises to be an advocate for perpetual war. Just as McCain misrepresents anything short of support for perpetual war as “isolationism,” Rubio wants to portray it as an embrace of American decline. Like Paul Ryan, Rubio absurdly exaggerates and then overreacts to the dangers that come with what he describes as decline. Here is a sample:

If America declines, who will serve as living proof that liberty, security and prosperity can all exist together?

Today, radical Islam abuses and oppresses women. It has no tolerance for other faiths, and it seeks to impose its will on the whole world. If America declines, who will stand up to them and defeat them?

Today, children are used as soldiers and trafficked as slaves. Dissidents are routinely imprisoned without trial. They’re subjected to torture and forced into confessions and labor. If America declines, what nation on the earth will take these causes as their own?

What will the world look like if America declines? Who’s going to create the innovations of the 21st century?Who will stretch the limits of human potential and explore the new frontiers? And if America declines, who will do all these things and ask for nothing in return?

Motivated solely by the desire to make the world a better place?

Whenever Rubio refers to American decline, we need to remember that what he means by this is that the U.S. will not attack other countries, intervene in their internal conflicts, or attempt to dictate the pace and content of political developments abroad as much as the U.S. does right now. In other words, what Rubio calls decline is what many of us would call a return to normal, or at least a reduction in the number and frequency of foreign conflicts and entanglements. What Rubio calls American decline is what many other nations around the world would refer to as being left alone.

In fact, the decline Rubio describes won’t prevent the U.S. from being that “living proof” of the co-existence of liberty, security, and prosperity. It is quite conceivable that both American liberty and security would be enhanced when our government concentrates its “defense” policies on nothing but the defense of the U.S. and those allies that America will have for limited periods of time. There are many states that already combat jihadist militants on their own soil at great cost, and because most of them are fighting largely in self-defense they are going to continue doing so no matter what the U.S. does or does not do. Something that believers in Rubio’s particular version of American exceptionalism seem to take for granted is that the rest of the world is largely hopeless without constant, direct American involvement in their affairs. If that was ever true, it isn’t any longer. It is flattering to us to believe that other successful nations have become successful only by basking in the reflected glory of American light, as Rubio claims at the end of his speech:

You see, these nations, these new emerging nations, these new shining cities, we hope they will join us, but they can never replace us. Because their light is but a reflection of our own.

The rest of the world increasingly doesn’t need the U.S. in the way that it did in the past. Most nations are simply not going to cooperate with an international order premised on the idea that they must remain forever under American tutelage and direction. For their part, Americans are understandably tired of a role that has become outdated and redundant.

P.S. I should add that the conviction that the U.S. government is motivated “solely by the desire to make the world a better place” is not just untrue, but for those who believe this it means that there is no definable limit on what the U.S. should be trying to do to “make the world a better place.” In an era of austerity, Rubio is proposing that the U.S. engage in infinite meliorism for the whole world. Not only can the U.S. not afford this, but there is no nation that ever could.