Marco Rubio formally announced his candidacy for president yesterday in Miami. He emphasized that he would provide up-to-date and relevant ideas for contemporary problems:

Why is this happening in a country that for over two centuries has been defined by equality of opportunity? It’s because while our people and our economy are pushing the boundaries of the 21st century, too many of our leaders and their ideas are stuck in the 20th century.

It is more than a little strange that Rubio would rail against politicians whose ideas are “stuck in the 20th century” when many of his own policy ideas, especially regarding international affairs, are so outdated and trapped in another era. Rubio is a leading defender of the embargo of Cuba, hostility towards Iran, and antagonism towards Russia. His foreign policy is very much rooted in 20th century preoccupations, and on those issues he remains stubbornly wedded to an approach to foreign policy that hasn’t been relevant in a generation. While he wants to present himself as a candidate offering “21st century” solutions, his own slogan “a New American Century” is itself a throwback to the late 1990s and the neoconservative Project for a New American Century. That’s not some accident of phrasing. It is a statement of ideological conviction, which is reflected in Rubio’s confrontational and hard-line foreign policy agenda.

Rubio’s “new American century” is one filled with unnecessary conflicts and clashes with other countries. He derides “this administration’s dangerous concessions to Iran and its hostility to Israel,” which reflects his loathing for diplomacy and his preference for coercive and aggressive policies. He wants the U.S. to no longer be “passive in the face of Chinese and Russian aggression,” which implies that he thinks the U.S. should be risking conflicts with two of the world’s other major powers. He wants to end “the near total disregard for the erosion of democracy and human rights around the world, especially Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua.” In practice, that means that he thinks the U.S. should be pursuing policies that interfere in the internal affairs of other countries, and he is most concerned to interfere in countries in Latin America whose governments he dislikes. Rubio’s desire for a “new American century” is just as ideological and dangerous as the phrase suggests. It ought to make his candidacy even less appealing than it already is.

He remarked that his “candidacy might seem improbable to some watching from abroad,” but he both gives other countries too little credit and presumes too much about his own chances. Candidates from humbler backgrounds than his have risen to the highest offices in other countries, but he is compelled to ignore this because he needs to promote the fiction that such opportunities are greater here than anywhere else. One could cite the current president of Brazil or the prime minister of India as examples of people that rose to the top of their political systems from even poorer backgrounds. Like so many other things Rubio has to say about American exceptionalism, his belief that people from humble origins can’t rise to high office in other countries is based on a profound misunderstanding of other countries’ political systems and undue confidence in social mobility in our own country.

Rubio is worried about the possibility that the U.S. “will have just become another country,” but he doesn’t allow himself to consider that this may have already happened and that it isn’t necessarily such a terrible thing. The exceptionalist fetish compels Rubio to believe that America isn’t just “another country,” and yet that would not be such an awful fate. Only those that think the next century must be an American one are alarmed by the thought that the U.S. will not be responsible for “leading” the world for the next eighty-five years. Most Americans won’t see this as a problem, and they may even welcome it with some measure of relief. That is just one reason why Rubio’s pitch is likely to fall flat with voters. He is promising to usher in a future that many of us simply don’t want.