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Marco Rubio proved he can hang with the big hawks in his first foreign policy speech since he declared his run for president.

The student has now become the teacher.

Sen. Marco Rubio, once viewed as a protege of presidential competitor Jeb Bush, schooled the former Florida governor Wednesday evening in the first national security address of his national campaign.

As compared to Jeb Bush, who fumbled and stumbled through his first major national security address, Marco Rubio delivered a master class on foreign policy that spoke to the soul of the right’s hawkish neoconservatives.

In New York City, before the Council of Foreign Relations and their foreign policy experts, Rubio showed himself to be a peer.

In an hour before the Council, he spoke about everything from Filipino typhoon survivors to keeping South China Sea transit ways accessible—and at one point corrected longtime broadcaster and forum moderator Charlie Rose about the extent to which there are Iranian fighters in Iraq.

And he got into the details: he condemned Iranian efforts to develop a long-range ballistic missile capability, a specific gripe of hawkish Iranian experts that doesn’t get much attention. He said the conditions don’t exist for a two-state solution; that the VA system needs to be reformed; that he’s open to Ukraine joining NATO.

Compare this to Jeb Bush’s first big national security speech in February, before the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, where Bush mispronounced Boko Haram, misidentified Iraq, mistakenly placed the size of ISIS and couldn’t remember the title of ISIS’ Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Meanwhile, Bush has spent the last few days in a quagmire: asked if he would have still invaded Iraq given the benefit of hindsight, he told Fox that he would have. Then came the backpedaling: first, the claim that he misheard the question; then, dismissing the question as merely a hypothetical. Bush got battered by this misstep, drawing criticism from potential rivals New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Sen. Rand Paul.

When Charlie Rose asked Rubio the same hypothetical that Bush had been asked, Rubio swatted it away swiftly.

“Not only would I not have been in favor of it, President Bush would not have been in favor of it,” Rubio said....

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/05/13/rubio-shows-jeb-how-foreign-policy-is-done.html