Marco Rubio is set to deliver a foreign policy speech focused on China at the end of the week:

Rubio is likely to criticize China when he gives what his campaign calls a major foreign policy speech in South Carolina on Friday.

The Reuters report draws on relevant quotes from Rubio’s recent Foreign Affairs essay, which emphasized the importance of opposing China in East Asia. As I mentioned before, Rubio’s essay contained a number of odd and unfounded statements, and the section on China was no exception. Rubio wrote:

If the United States hopes to restore stability in East Asia, it has to speak with clarity and strength regarding the universal rights and values that America represents.

This statement is strange in a few ways. First, East Asia is already reasonably stable. There are tensions between China and some of its neighbors, and there are outstanding territorial disputes among them, but the region is far from being unstable. Stability there doesn’t need to be “restored.” At most, it needs to be preserved, and there isn’t much reason to think Rubio is actually interested in doing that. This is another instance of how Rubio abuses the meaning of the word stability to mean something very different.

Just as he talks about the importance of stability in the Near East while insisting on regime change in Syria and endorsing the Saudi attack on Yemen, Rubio would like to “restore stability” by doing more to confront and antagonize the major power in the region. The statement is odd in another way, since Rubio’s agenda of confronting China would require the U.S. to have a closer relationship with dictatorships in the region such as Vietnam. That would almost certainly preclude speaking “with clarity and strength” about rights and values as far as Vietnam is concerned. Rubio wants to pay lip service to “rights and values,” but he also favors an aggressive and combative foreign policy that inevitably requires the U.S. to make dubious bargains with local dictators.

Rubio also takes for granted that “the manner in which governments treat their own citizens is indicative of the manner in which they will treat other nations,” but this is frequently not true for democracies or for authoritarian states. Relatively liberal and democratic states in very recent history have attacked and wrecked other countries in unnecessary wars, and many abusive authoritarian states don’t launch aggressive wars or seek to overthrow other governments. The nature of a regime and its treatment of its own people don’t reliably tell us what kind of foreign policy that government will have. Rubio assumes that there is a close relationship between the two because that is what his particular kind of hawk likes to believe, but it usually isn’t true.

He refers to “China’s expansion in East Asia” that needs to be countered, but this is an exaggerated description of Chinese behavior. What “expansion” there is is very limited and it is tied up in the territorial disputes with its neighbors to which the U.S. isn’t and shouldn’t be a party. A more confrontational approach to China runs the risk of increased intransigence and belligerence from Beijing, and that potentially puts its neighbors more at risk than they would otherwise be. As he usually does, Rubio prefers a combative approach without weighing the costs or thinking through the consequences of the hard-line position that he favors. He assumes that more confrontation will force China to change its behavior in the way that Washington and other governments prefer, but this is placing a huge wager based on nothing more than an ideological attachment to “strength.” We can expect to hear more of these misguided and counterproductive ideas in his speech on Friday, when we will be reminded once again why he should not be president.