Rubio's foreign policy recalls Bush's second term

Rubio insists we have an obligation to depose Bashar al-Assad in Syria, but he has no clear strategy to handle what might come after the dictator — just vague promises of a negotiated diplomatic solution. Optimism for this doesn’t jibe with facts on the ground. At the beginning of the uprising in Syria, with Iran suffering under strict sanctions, it might have been possible to replace Assad with a pro-Western or at least neutral Alawite regime, and have the Sunni parts of Syria run by anti-ISIS tribes with whom we can cooperate. But now, with the rise of ISIS and the Russian presence in Syria, we have no such option.

Unfortunately, we have only a limited ability to effect or even conceptualize a political situation in Syria that will aid American interests. We’re mediocre imperialists at best. Bush in his second term, for instance, let America-hating Islamists such as Muqtada al-Sadr run political organizations under our noses in Iraq. Obama and Hillary in their turn ignored the potential of Iran’s Green Revolution, then completely disregarded Libya’s political crisis after they removed Qaddafi. Would Rubio manage better? His long cooperation with John McCain, who romanced the Muslim Brotherhood during the Arab Spring, isn’t reassuring…

His positions on security issues usually boil down to sending more money to the Pentagon. But throwing funds at broken bureaucracies is dubious management and won’t appeal to voters. A better candidate would prioritize reform: Pentagon procurement of new weapon systems is broken, no president in generations has trusted the State Department, and the CIA politicizes its intelligence reports and is focused more on drone wars than on stealing secrets.

Fixing these problems means challenging the entrenched bureaucracies populating these institutions and their allies in both parties on Capitol Hill. It was Bush’s unwillingness to do this that led to the decline of his presidency in its second term, especially his deference to Foreign Service officers who produced disastrous policies for Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.