Republican presidential candidate Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky blasted fellow White House aspirant Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) as a neocon who will continue the failed foreign policies that have weakened the U.S. for nearly two decades. And Rubio is doing his best to prove Paul right.

Paul, during a weekend appearance on CNN, said that Republican voters should only consider Rubio as a viable option if they were happy with Hillary Clinton’s style as the nation’s top diplomat. That’s because, despite belonging to different political parties, the two share a devotion to neoconservative foreign policy.

“I see her as a neoconservative,” Paul told CNN’s Jake Tapper of Clinton.

“I see her and Rubio as being the same person,” he continued. “They both wanted a no-fly zone. They both have supported activity in Libya — the war in Libya that toppled (Moammar) Gadhafi, an intervention that made us less safe.

“They both have supported pouring arms into the Syrian civil war, a mistake that I think allowed ISIS to grow stronger. And they both have supported the Iraq war. So I mean, what’s the difference?”

If Rubio had hoped to counter Paul’s argument that he is a neoconservative who would ramp up military spending without regard for how it actually affects international outcomes, he didn’t let it show during a separate appearance Sunday morning.

In fact, the Florida senator spent the duration of an interview on Fox Business’ “Mornings with Maria” Sunday claiming that reducing military spending by a single cent is a “unsustainable,” “dangerous” and “reckless” idea.

“We need to get back to funding our defenses because it is the most important thing the federal government does,” Rubio said.

Defense experts have estimated that the defense plan Rubio has laid out as part of his presidential campaign would increase U.S. defense spending by more than $1 trillion over the next 10 years.

“He just wants to do more of everything, he wants the U.S. to be everywhere,” Benjamin Friedman, a defense research fellow at the Cato Institute, recently told Washington Examiner. “It seems to be unlikely that the scoring of the 2012 budget would be enough money even to do all those things.”

Rubio claims he’ll offset the massive increases in military spending by making cuts and reforms to entitlement programs.

“Defense spending is not the reason why we have a debt. It’s not the driver of our national debt,” Rubio said. “Our national debt, especially long-term, is driven by mandatory spending programs that need to be reformed.”

Of course, no matter where he says he’ll get the money, recent headlines make it difficult to believe that more money is what the Pentagon needs.

A report out from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute in April found that U.S. military spending topped out at $610 billion in 2014. Military spending in the U.S. has dropped 20 percent since peaking in 2010, but the nation continues to spend 45 percent more on the military than it did in 2001 prior to 9/11. Current spending levels are similar to a previous period of high military spending sparked by geopolitical anxieties in the late 1980s.

The recent drop in military spending was caused by deficit-cutting provisions in the 2011 Budget Control Act, which mandated a decade-long series of defense and non-defense budget cuts. While Congress walked back some of the cuts with a 2013 budget agreement, others remain in place today.

Those modest cuts are the ones Rubio says the nation can’t sustain.