Marco Rubio gives a Wilsonian speech
Florida Senator Marco Rubio gave another foreign policy speech this week that laid out what I think can reasonably be described as a very Wilsonian view of the world. In it, he makes the following claim:
There are still vast forces of evil seeking to destroy us. The form of the threat has changed since Trumanâ??s time. But evil remains potentâ??and America remains the strongest line of defense, often the only line of defense.
"Vast forces of evil." It's interesting that the only way to justify the Wilsonian premise is by marshaling factually dubious descriptions of the world. Earlier in the speech he calls out Iran and North Korea, alongside the instability and danger caused by terrorist enclaves in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Evil (or better, dangerous), for sure, but "vast"?
Rubio also makes a rather curious statement about China, singling them out for their desire to "dominate" East Asia. This after an entire speech dedicated to the premise that the U.S. has a duty and obligation to see its preferred system of government imposed globally and that there is "no corner of the world" we can safely turn our back on. If a member of the People's Liberation Army declared that China could not be safe in a world that did not embrace one-party state capitalism and that the goal of Chinese policy should be the subversion of governments everywhere that did not conform to its view of how society should be ordered, we would all be rightly alarmed.
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.
