Pence sounded like Rubio on national security too. Echoing the GOP foreign-policy establishment, he attacked Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for retreating from America’s imperial role. He said Clinton’s “weak foreign policy” had “emboldened the aggression of Russia” in Ukraine. He demanded that in Syria “the provocations by Russia need to be met by American strength,” including even America air strikes against Bashar Assad’s pro-Russian regime. He called for deepening America’s commitment to NATO by deploying missile defense in Poland and the Czech Republic. And he proposed strengthening America’s Asian alliances in order to challenge Beijing in the South China Sea and preserve “the demilitarization of the Korean peninsula.”

Pence has forgotten his running mate’s slogan: America First. During the primaries, Trump stressed that his problem with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton wasn’t that they had retreated too much from America’s imperial role but that they had not retreated enough. New military commitments to NATO? In July, Trump told The New York Times he might not even uphold America’s current ones. Contain North Korea’s nuclear program? In March, Trump told the Times that, “every time North Korea raises its head, you know, we get calls from Japan and we get calls from everybody else, and ‘Do something.’ And there’ll be a point at which we’re just not going to be able to do it anymore. … We’re not a rich country. ... we cannot be the policeman of the world.” Challenge Russia over Ukraine? Trump told the Times that, “we are the least affected by what happens with Ukraine because we’re the farthest away … Why is it that countries that are bordering the Ukraine and near the Ukraine—why is it that they’re not more involved? Why is it that they are not more involved? Why is it always the United States that gets right in the middle of things?”

On Syria, Pence demanded that the U.S. confront Moscow and reassert America’s regional dominance, which is pretty much what Rubio, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, and Carly Fiorina demanded during the primaries. And Trump slammed them for it. “They want to start World War III over Syria,” he declared in last September. “Give me a break. You know, Russia wants to get ISIS, right? We want to get ISIS. Russia is in Syria — maybe we should let them do it? Challenged in a November debate by Bush for his non-interventionist stances on Ukraine and Syria, Trump said the world was laughing at America’s imperial overstretch: “‘Keep going, you dummies, keep going. Protect us,’” Trump mimicked. “We have to get smart. We can’t continue to be the policeman of the world. We are $19 trillion dollars, we have a country that’s going to hell, we have an infrastructure that’s falling apart. Our roads, our bridges, our schools, our airports, and we have to start investing money in our country.”