After claiming a special expertise in foreign policy, GOP presidential wannabe Marco Rubio finds himself under fire because of his neoconservative tendencies. He’s responded in the usual way for someone whose policies would keep America perpetually at war: accuse his critics of being “isolationists.”
Trying to defend his record of supporting such disastrous misadventures as Iraq and Libya, he denounced unnamed foes who sought “to derail the postwar consensus about America’s role in the world.” This outrageous yet anonymous “they,” he added, “will never call themselves isolationists, but that is exactly what they are.”
Against Ted Cruz, the likely intended target, the claim obviously is nonsense. After all, Cruz recently proposed carpet‐bombing the Islamic State.
What Rubio unintentionally illustrated was the fact that “isolationist” today has been stripped of almost all meaning to become an all‐purpose epithet. Indeed, if “isolationist” means anything today, it simply is “you don’t want to intervene where I want to intervene.”