What multilateral regime of sanctions are you referring to? As far as I know, only the US is embargoing Cuba. Or have I misunderstood you?
The President doesn’t “dictate” foreign policy either. He simply has powers that give him preeminence in foreign policy, with some important limits:
- Congress has the power of the purse.
- Congress has the power to approve or reject treaties
- Congress has the power to declare war
- Congress can impose or lift sanctions, and related to that
- Congress has power over international commerce, ie trade.
Congress does not concede its right to take action in any of those fields just because the President would rather do something else.
If you guys want to argue about Iran sanctions, go open a new thread.
Stick to praising or bashing Rubio in this one.
[ /Moderating ]
Ah. Sanctions against Iran. I missed how a thread on Marco Rubio’s Cuba policies had turned into a discussion of Iran. No wonder I was confused. :smack:
Iran, not Cuba.
I don’t dispute Rubio’s authority, if he were elected, to tear up any US involvement in a potential nuclear deal. I don’t dispute Congress’ ability to undermine a deal. My problem is with the staggering lack of judgment he displays in thinking a) that this would serve American interests and b) that somehow the US in that scenario would retain the leadership and credibility required to get the rest of the P5+1 to sign onto a renewed round of even more punishing sanctions. The latter in particular is a perspective unhinged from reality, which (along with similarly nonsensical comments like the US isn’t fighting ISIS harder because we’re afraid of upsetting Iran [aka their mortal enemy]) tells me that Marco Rubio doesn’t know what he’s talking about in matters of foreign policy. That he evidently believes he does is a testament to his lack of humility, self-awareness, and willingness (or ability) to learn.
He would be a disaster in the White House.
I’m not sure that’s a net positive in Republican primaries. Anyway, the truth is that Rubio is basically a Jindal: brilliant in the areas he understands, hopeless in the ones he doesn’t. He’s already out of his depth as a senator.
No snark intended, but in what areas is Rubio brilliant?
Tax reform and controlling the size of government, mostly. I think his plans are stupid, but they are actual plans, unlike the pablum (or AEI copy-pastes) that most Republican legislators put out.
The bigger problem is that Rubio has done nothing but politics in his young life and he’s never run anything. He should be thinking about succeeding Rick Scott or being a career legislator like a lot of people who have made politics their career.
How is someone who’s never run anything qualified to govern Florida?
Scott’s run lots of things and sucks balls.
Isn’t Rubio a favorite of the Koch Brothers and the billion dollars they intend to invest in the next election? That should give him a big edge.
We have very low standards here.
This is one of the more baffling things Rubio has said on foreign policy, and I see only two logical alternatives. Either he is painfully ignorant of basic regional dynamics in the Middle East, or he believes that voters are stupid and he is cynically exploiting that perceived stupidity to score partisan points.
There’s a third explanation. There’s a tendency, most pronounced in Christian Right circles (you can see it in the Left Behind books, for instance), but leaking out into the wingnut world in general, to believe that all the Bad Guys are allied in one big Evil League of Evil. That’s how they get liberal atheists on the same side as radical Muslims who want all gays executed and all women in burqas.
On the right, we’re seeing the rise of politicians who grew up swallowing the snake oil that the previous generation of politicians/activists/grifters pitched to the marks. They’ve got this world view embedded in them. So Rubio may not see the need to even understand Shia and Sunni or any of that. ISIS and Iran are Bad Guys, and even in the same part of the world, so they’re obviously allies.
Jim Newell makes the same suggestion in the cited article, RTFirefly.
But I think there’s a more charitable explanation. Rubio could believe that Iran doesn’t want the US more involved in fighting ISIS because Iran wants to fight ISIS itself, and to use ISIS as a lever for increasing it’s influence in Syria and Iraq, which might be harder if the US takes on a larger role. Newell rejects that explanation out-of-hand, but not for very good reasons.
That makes sense. There’s a good chance that’s what Rubio is getting at. But then he needs to do a better job of making that particular argument. Based on Rubio’s statements that have been quoted in the press (perhaps out of context), it sounds like he’s deliberately obscuring the line between Iran and ISIS to be able to act like they’re somehow in league with each other, when the opposite is true.
If he’s making the more reasoned argument that you raise, he’ll have to explain to the public why a policy that gets our adversaries to die horribly bringing horrible deaths upon adversaries we hate even more is such a bad policy. Someone needs to ask him, “Senator Rubio, would you prefer that your constituents (or their children) be sent to die on the battlefield against ISIS than to let Iran potentially take a larger role in Iraq?”
But, that would not explain why Rubio would believe that “much of our strategy with regards to ISIS is being driven by a desire not to upset Iran.”
Why not?
I think his perspective may well be that ISIS is obviously threatening, and evil, and can be stopped by American intervention, but that we aren’t doing that much. So, to him, the hallmark of our current policy is restraint. And he is theorizing that this restraint comes from a reluctance to upset Iran in the way described.
I’m not at all defending the correctness of that view. I think it’s wrong for a few reasons. But I don’t think we have to posit that Rubio is just demagoguing, or that he is entirely ignorant of basic realities.