When Marco Rubio arrived at the Brookings Institution yesterday
to give a speech on foreign policy, the room was packed, with more
than a dozen cameras pointed at the podium. Rubio, of course, is
often mentioned in speculation over who Mitt Romney will choose as
his running mate; some,
like BuzzFeed’s Zeke Miller, saw the speech as little more than
an audition for the vice presidential nomination. But Rubio might
just as easily have been taking the opportunity, while he has the
attention of the media, to lay out ideas that are important to him,
and that he’s been talking about for a long time — as Jim
Antle has noted, Rubio’s position in the intra-Republican
debate over foreign policy isn’t a new development.
Rubio spent a good portion of his speech
praising
The World America Made, a recent book by Brookings
scholar Bob Kagan. One of the few Republicans at a mostly
left-of-center think tank, Kagan is an adviser to Mitt Romney who,
as Marvin Kalb brought up the Q&A following Rubio’s speech, has
also caught the attention of Barack Obama: The
president reportedly cited
Kagan’s New Republic article, “The Myth of American
Decline” — taken from The World America Made — as
an influence on his State of the Union declaration that “anyone who
tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has
waned, doesn’t know what they’re talking about.”
But while Obama accepts Kagan’s descriptive argument that
American hegemony is more robust than many observers think, he
clearly doesn’t accept Kagan’s prescriptive arguments about how to
keep it that way. Hence Rubio’s critique of the president’s
foreign policy:
So yes, global problems do require international coalitions. On
that point this administration is correct. But effective
international coalitions don’t form themselves. They need to be
instigated and led, and more often than not, they can only be
instigated and led by us. And that is what this administration
doesn’t understand. Yes, there are more countries able and willing
to join efforts to meet the global challenges of our time. But
experience has proven that American leadership is almost always
indispensible to their success….
For example, we can’t always rely on the UN Security Council to
achieve consensus on major threats to international peace and
security…. The Security Council remains a valuable forum, but not
an indispensable one. We can’t walk away from a problem because
some members of the Security Council refuse to act.
Later in the speech, Rubio paired his critique of the
leading-from-behind ethos that follows from the White House’s
emphasis on transnational institutions with his critique of Ron
Paul-style anti-interventionism:
I disagree with the way in which the current administration has
chosen to engage. For while there are few global problems we can
solve by ourselves, there are virtually no global problems that can
be solved without us. In confronting the challenges of our time,
there are more nations than ever capable of contributing, but there
is still only one that is capable of leading.
And I disagree with voices in my own party who argue we should
not engage at all. Who warn we should heed the words of John Quincy
Adams not to go “abroad, in search of monsters to destroy”.
Paleoconservative journalist Michael Brendan Dougherty comments,
“I have never heard a prominent American pol cite John Quincy
Adams’ ‘she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy’ to
contradict it.” I don’t know about a politician, but I have heard
that line contradicted — by Bob Kagan, writing with Bill Kristol
(whom I spotted at Brookings yesterday) in their classic 1996
Foreign Affairs essay,
“Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy”:
Conservatives these days succumb easily to the charming old
metaphor of the United States as a “city on a hill.” They hark
back, as George Kennan did in these pages not long ago, to the
admonition of John Quincy Adams that America ought not go “abroad
in search of monsters to destroy.” But why not? The alternative is
to leave monsters on the loose, ravaging and pillaging to their
hearts’ content, as Americans stand by and watch. What may have
been wise counsel in 1823, when America was a small, isolated power
in a world of European giants, is no longer so, when America is the
giant.
“Neo-Reaganite” never really caught on (perhaps unsurprisingly
— it remains contested what Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy record
should mean for a post-Cold War world). Kristol and Kagan’s foreign
policy prescriptions — especially the endorsement of “actively
promoting American principles of governance abroad” that later
developed into what George W. Bush would call a forward strategy of
freedom — came instead to be dubbed neoconservative (which meant
something a bit different back when it was first applied to people
like Kristol’s father Irving, but I digress).
The neocons are often cast as the villains of the Bush years,
blamed for leading the country into a calamitous Mesopotamian
misadventure. The historical record doesn’t really support this
narrative. The invasion of Iraq was supported by a broad swath of
the right, left, and center. The instance where president Bush
followed the neocons out onto a limb against skeptical majority
opinion was the troop surge, designed in part by Bob Kagan’s
brother Fred. That policy rescued the war from totally unmitigated
disaster; one would think that would leave its architects at least
somewhat vindicated. And while the spread of American-style
governance hasn’t exactly gone smoothly in recent years, the
drawbacks to supporting ultimately unstable authoritarian regimes
have, as
Elliott Abrams argues, also been thrown into relief.
An idea isn’t necessarily bad because George W. Bush was
attracted to it. The vision of American hegemony as an engine of
freedom is one artifact of the Bush years that is worth defending,
and good for Marco Rubio for defending it.
