Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) is making the most of his moment, and in a rare instance putting Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) in his place for his nonsensical foreign policy proclamations and upstaging fellow Cuban American Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.). Friday night Rand Paul had whined that Rubio had been “rude” in saying the libertarian-leaning junior Kentucky senator didn’t “know what he was talking about” when he cheered the prospect that economic interaction would improve Cubans’ plight. (Rand Paul’s observation about the wonders of economic engagement was particularly inapt in light of the facts that Obama’s increased trade and economic cooperation for four-plus years with Russia did nothing to affect its international behavior and Obama’s relaxation of sanctions against Iran has only whetted the mullahs’ appetite for confrontation.)
On Sunday, Rubio continued his attacks on the president’s decision (and by implication Rand Paul’s identical view) to lift the five-decades-long embargo against Cuba. Rubio made both the moral and strategic case against normalization: “If you’re going to make concessions to Cuba…there has to be some reciprocal opening on their part toward democracy,” he said on Meet the Press. “There was none.” He was succinct on ABC’s This Week: “My interest is singular. Freedom and democracy in Cuba.”
As for other totalitarian regimes, Rubio said on ABC:
We have those policies of normalization toward Vietnam, for example, toward China. They’re not any more politically free today than they were when that normalization happened. They may have a bigger economy, but their political freedoms, certainly I would not hold up China or Saudi Arabia or Vietnam as examples of political freedom, proving my point, that engagement by itself does not guarantee or even lead to political freedoms.
And that — the Cuban government controls every aspect of their economy. The whole economy is owned and cooperated by a holding company controlled by Cuban military officials.
They will take more travel, they will take more commerce, they will pocket the vast majority of the money that’s generated from it.
And they have already and they intend to follow the model of Vietnam and China, where they can grow their economy, but they don’t grow political freedoms. In fact, they repress them.
Rubio not only made his case adroitly, but he also sniffed out just how radical and a-factual is Rand Paul’s world view. Rubio pointedly refused to say he had confidence in Rand Paul’s foreign policy views. (” I anticipate supporting whoever the Republican nominee is and I’m pretty confident that the Republican nominee for president will be someone who has a pretty forceful role — view of America’s role in the world as a defender of democracy and of freedom and also understands that it’s important for America to be engaged on the global stage.”) But the altercation made plain how difficult Rand Paul will find it to convince GOP voters he would be any improvement over the Obama-Hillary Clinton-John Kerry foreign policy. (“Well, first of all, Rand, if he wants to become the chief cheerleader of Obama’s foreign policy, he certainly has a right to do that. I’m going to continue to oppose the. . . .Obama-Paul foreign policy on Cuba because I know it won’t lead to freedom and liberty for the Cuban people, which is my sole interest here.”)
Paul is in a box of his own making, although Rubio certainly drew attention to the junior senator who seems more like Obama than Reagan with each international crisis. As Stephen Hayes writes:
Paul cites the examples of Iran and North Korea to make his point that diplomacy doesn’t make the United States less safe. But U.S. diplomacy in those places has failed repeatedly and left us unquestionably less safe. On Iran, the U.S. reengagement began under George W. Bush, and despite our willing diplomacy the Iranian regime: accelerated its nuclear weapons program; expanded its support for regional terrorist groups; harbored senior al Qaeda figures and their families; and funded, trained, and equipped jihadists responsible for the deaths of hundreds of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. . . These are Rand Paul’s examples of good diplomacy.
Rand Paul’s ideology leaves us exactly where Obama’s view puts us. If any deal is preferable to U.S. action, then we are willing to give away the store literally without a fight. If Rand Paul’s musing are not, as Hayes speculates, evidence “he may not have been paying much attention to national security over the past three decades,” they surely are evidence that he marinated too long in his father’s toxic stew of conspiracy, isolationism and naiveté. For many in the spectrum from the center-left through the solid right, Rand Paul would be the only person considering a run for president who would be more frightful as commander in chief than Obama.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2014/12/21/marco-rubio-makes-his-point/
