Marco Rubio on Latin America
Marco Rubio has an L.A. Times op-ed on Latin America, the basic message of which is that we need to tell Latin American governments more about what they should be doing. The United States needs to:
--tell them we need an FTAA, which many governments do not view positively
--tell them they need to be more concerned about Iran, which is not seen by many Latin Americans as a hemispheric threat
--tell them to think differently about Cuba, even though our policy has long been rejected by our allies
--tell them to make sure we have access to their oil
Regardless of what you think about each particular issue, the overall tone is not really one of engagement, as there is virtually no discussion about what Latin American countries want. The irony is that policies intended to demonstrate we "care" (his word) can actually lead to greater isolation.
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Florida Senator Marco Rubio went to the Brookings Institution ( Moderate and Liberal Think Thank ) and in a speech essentially cast himself as a liberal internationalist rather than as a neo-con.
Mitt Romney can not nominate Marco Rubio as vicepresident without making the Greatest U-Turn, Flip-Flop and About-Face in American Politics of the third millennium.
Marco Rubio, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, would have been booed at a Republican Debate for his sound positions that are not far from those of President Obama.
Does Marco Rubio know that year 2012 will be a disaster for Republicans ?? - Is he already taking distance of Mitt Romney and the right wing extremists, so that he has a better future in year 2016 and beyond ??
The New Yorker
Marco Rubio, Centrist
Posted by Ryan Lizza
April 25, 2012
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/04/lizza-rubio.html
Some excerpts :
The first thing to note about Senator Marco Rubio’s “major” foreign-policy speech today was the venue. Most important Republicans choose to speak about foreign policy at the Heritage Foundation or, especially in the Bush era, the American Enterprise Institute, which incubated and defended the neo-conservatism that defined Bush’s foreign policy. (It’s still Dick Cheney’s forum of choice.) Rubio spoke instead at the venerable Brookings Institution, one of the oldest think tanks in Washington and one that has long fetishized bipartisanship, even as the place has come to be associated with Democrats and a respectable brand of moderate liberalism.
Everything about the speech was meant to send a message of bipartisanship. He was accompanied by Joe Lieberman, the hawkish ex-Democrat, and introduced by Brookings President Strobe Talbott, Deputy Secretary of State in the Clinton administration. He began by noting that he often partners with Democrats in the Senate, and he name-checked Bob Kagan, the author and foreign-policy thinker most famous these days for being mentioned by Barack Obama as his major influence.
Rubio, elected to the Senate in 2010 and now a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, gave a crisp and thoughtful tour of the world that, with very few changes, could easily have come out of the mouth of Barack Obama. He spoke passionately about “foreign aid,” a phrase that would have gotten him booed at a Republican debate. He repeatedly championed the now seemingly quaint post-war tradition of bipartisanship in foreign policy. And when, during a question-and-answer period, he was pressed to describe his differences with President Obama, he was restrained in his criticism and nuanced in explaining how he would handle certain hot spots differently. He twice mentioned the Clinton administration—positively.
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