At first blush, it may appear that Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., has given two very different speeches at the Council on Foreign Relations about his vision for America's role in the world. Or has he? The Rubio who gave an address in 2012 and the one who spoke this week certainly seemed different. The Rubio of 2012, introduced as a leading light of "enlightened GOP foreign policy," lived up to his name. In 2012, he offered gentle criticism and even some praise for the White House's foreign policy efforts, invoking the word "pragmatic" like a talisman. The Rubio of 2015 appears to be an "unabashed hawk."
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What has changed? The most cynical explanation would argue the voters – or at the very least, the campaign backers – want a more bellicose or assertive foreign policy. Rubio has taken the lead in what's become known as the "Sheldon Adelson primary," and he's captured some other major backers already as well.
In reality, though, Rubio's policy isn't necessarily more aggressive than 2012; rather, his rhetoric has changed – a change that has largely been driven by and centered around Iran.
Rubio's foreign policy doctrine for 2016 consists of three pillars: American strength, which is first and foremost defined by a well-funded military; a robust, globalized economy; and adherence to America's so-called core moral values – political and economic freedom, human rights and territorial sovereignty.
On Iranian nuclear negotiations, Rubio – one of the 47 signatories of Sen. Tom Cotton's (R-Ark.) letter to Iranian leaders in March – has taken a much more hard-line approach. It's no surprise, then, that he effectively described his ideal deal as a zero-sum game. A number of countries use nuclear power, he said, but Iran doesn't need it. He argued that granting Iran limited capacity to enrich uranium, even if only for peaceful purposes, guarantees that it will exploit ambiguities and loopholes to develop weapons-grade material, even after sanctions are lifted (as Iranians have insisted they must be). Because sanctions are unlikely to be reinstated, Rubio sees Iran's leaders as willing to feign agreement long enough to get the sanctions lifted before returning to business as usual – rendering any agreement worthless to the West.
Rubio also perceives the administration as having exacerbated power vacuums in the international arena – in Syria, Iraq and now Libya, which have provided fertile soil for the sort of terrorist infrastructure that encouraged the rise of the Islamic State group. What action there has been should have come far earlier and have been far more aggressive. "I did not consider [the Islamic State group] a JV team," he told Charlie Rose during the Council on Foreign Relations event. "In fact, I repeatedly warned that they were much, much more of a potent threat than the president was giving them credit for."
But the core of Rubio's argument against the administration's treatment of the Islamic State group and, indeed, most of Obama's Middle East policy – as became explicit during the question-and-answer session he had with Rose – is that it's largely ignoring the threat from Iran. When asked about some of his previous statements on the matter, Rubio reaffirmed his belief that the U.S. has held back against the Islamic State group in order to appease Iran. Iran, Rubio continued, has “tolerated airstrikes primarily because they can't do anything to stop them.†In March, news broke that the U.S. had begun supporting Iran’s efforts in Iraq, despite the administration’s numerous earlier claims to the contrary.
Coming out swinging on a possible Iran deal – which, if it goes through, will likely be trumpeted by the Obama administration as a defining triumph of its foreign policy legacy – allows Rubio to tap into deep-seated unease among voters. Indeed, according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll conducted in early March, a whopping 71 percent of voters believed the negotiations between a U.S.-led group of world powers and Iran wouldn't do much to stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon.
A similar poll conducted by the Pew Research Center in August 2014 found that this distrust ran largely across partisan lines. Republicans overwhelmingly (74 percent) saw Iran's nuclear program as a major threat to the United States. Much of the trouble, they thought, lay in Obama's approach to foreign policy – a hefty 77 percent of Republicans believed his foreign policy wasn't aggressive enough.
If voters are looking for a harder line from Rubio in his 2015 speech, that line is largely a rhetorical one. Rubio in 2012 was careful to dampen his criticism of the administration's work on Iran with hopes that he could be wrong. But by 2015, that measure of good faith was gone. Ultimately, that change is driven not just by a perception of what voters want, or by changes in facts on the ground, but also by an election dominated by two presidential legacies. Rubio seeks to distinguish himself from what he sees as the old guard, namely, the legacy of Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush.
The "new" Rubio of 2015 may not actually be that new when compared to the Rubio of 2012, but he's banking on seeming fresh and transformative compared to his rivals on both sides
