Is Marco Rubio a Centrist?

Marco Rubio has suddenly become the darling of Republican moderates. But why? He has so far proven to be a hardliner, especially on foreign policy.

Is a reality check in order or is it all an act of desperation? Suddenly, Marco Rubio, the 44-year-old Republican senator from Florida who finished a surprisingly strong third in the Iowa caucuses, is considered a centrist. He’s being described as “serious” and “predictable” and has become the last best hope moderate and less radical Republicans have for success in 2016.

All because he’s not quite as ultra-right as ideologue Ted Cruz, who won Iowa? Or because he’s somewhat less loony than the second place finisher – egomaniac real estate billionaire Donald Trump?

No, Marco Rubio is not a moderate and neither is he reasonable, much less a centrist. He’s a conservative – actually a hyper-conservative even when measured within the confines of the political matrix of the United States. Plus, he’s not even especially serious.

His name is not connected with any important legislation nor with any successful political initiative. In 2013 he got briefly involved with immigration reform that would have smoothed the way for some 12 million illegal immigrants to eventually become U.S. citizens. But as the political winds began to shift, Rubio ended up abandoning anything to do even with his own plan.

The senator missed many important votes because he apparently had more important things to attend to rather than help shape his nation. Or perhaps he was notably absent in order to avoid blame and possibly even legal responsibility for any unpopular or improper decisions he made.

Beyond that, Rubio has declared bankruptcy four times in the past 25 years. His relationship with money has been, to say the least, often a bit problematic. He has a history of inter-mingling the political with the private and has charged a family reunion, his wife’s private airline flights, movie tickets and floor tiles to a Republican Party credit card. He says he has paid all that back.

He is also said to have unduly enhanced his biography. His parents, he claimed, at one time fled Cuba to avoid becoming political prisoners of Fidel Castro. The truth is they were already in the United States for several years as economic refugees before Castro ever seized power.

Historical irony: If Marco Rubio, with his current hardline position on immigration, had been in the White House when he sought refuge here himself, he probably would have been refused entry.

One can afford to magnanimously overlook such trivial transgressions which in comparison to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s fudging of facts, seems almost harmless.

His devastating policy positions, domestic as well as foreign, weigh much more heavily here. Rubio wants to turn the historical clock back on many reforms Obama made into law over the past seven years or had upheld by the Supreme Court.

Rubio is, for example, against any right to an abortion – even in cases of rape or incest. He wants to abolish Obama’s health care reforms leading to eventual universal health care for all. And he intends to nullify the right to same sex marriage.

If he becomes president, he intends to loosen the restrictions on torturing prisoners and re-introduce the practice known as waterboarding (simulated drowning). “When I am commander-in-chief,” said Rubio, “the best intelligence services in the world will find the terrorists, and the best military in the world will destroy the terrorists, and if we capture them, they’re not going to get a lawyer, they’re not going to get the right to remain silent, they’re not going to a courtroom in Manhattan. They’re getting a one-way ticket to Guantanamo Bay and we’re going to find out everything they know.”

What should concern Europe and the rest of the world is Rubio’s dependence on military might and superpower politics as a basis for his foreign policy. Foreign Affairs Journal recently published his terror agenda: He would dramatically ramp up U.S. Army weaponry and deploy troops to eastern European NATO countries, nullify the nuclear agreement with Iran and end rapprochement with Cuba.

In contrast to Obama — whom Rubio considers a weakling — he would threaten the Tehran regime with America’s concentrated power and also send powerful military units to the Middle East as proof of his intention to prevail. And lastly, he would show more muscle toward China.

The terms “diplomacy” and “negotiation” are conspicuously missing from this agenda as is any mention of the disastrous political mistakes made by the U.S. over the past few decades. Likewise, no mention is made of the fact that America’s invasion of Iraq plunged the region into even more chaos and that it made the U.S. complicit in the Syrian war and the refugee crisis.

Rather than face up to that, Rubio will — like George W. Bush, self-styled purveyor of global democracy and human rights — try the same, even at bayonet-point if necessary. But it raises the suspicion that, compared to Rubio, Bush was a mere choirboy.