Marco Rubio is criminally overrated on foreign policy

He sits on a bunch of Senate committees. But that doesn't mean he knows of what he speaks.

Marco Rubio wants people to know that he's kind of a big deal when it comes to foreign policy. He has bragged about his expertise to Iowans, saying that "few, if any," of his potential Republican competitors "have spent the amount of time on it that I have."

Most recently, Rubio has been passionately defending the enormously unsuccessful, if emotionally satisfying, embargo on Cuba. He is attacking President Obama for establishing diplomatic relations with the Castros, and is making moves to undo their conciliation. It's hard to come up with a more useless foreign policy stance than this. But even if we excuse Rubio's position as an understandable part of his identity — stemming from his background and his loyalty to Florida's expatriate community — there is little other reason to think Rubio has any worthwhile foreign policy expertise, despite years of sitting on important committees.

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Michael Brendan Dougherty

Michael Brendan Dougherty is senior correspondent at TheWeek.com. He is the founder and editor of The Slurve, a newsletter about baseball. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, ESPN Magazine, Slate and The American Conservative.