Marco Rubio implicitly criticized Donald Trump’s foreign policy platform Tuesday but said that he would not vocally condemn the presumptive Republican nominee in the months before the election.
“My policy differences and reservations about Donald’s campaign are well established. I’ve said them often, and I stand by those,” Rubio said during a foreign policy-focused event at the Hudson Institute in Washington. “That said, I don’t view myself as a guy who’s going to sit here for the next six months taking shots at him.”
The Florida senator’s remarks echoed a statement he released Monday in which he asserted that he would not be Trump’s running mate.
While Rubio accepted Trump’s status as presumptive nominee “via the voters” and did not urge him to “change anything” about his policies Tuesday, he seemed to implicitly criticize Trump whilst laying out his own foreign policy stance.
Counter to Trump’s unorthodox foreign policy and his apparent idea that “international engagement is a one-way street,” Rubio asserted the importance of America’s global presence.
“A world without American engagement is a world none of us wants to live in,” Rubio said, while recognizing that American engagement does present “consequences and complexities.”
He also took a shot at Trump’s call to “reconstitute” the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), calling it the easy route.
“It’s a lot easier to say let’s walk away. It’s a lot easier to say for example, why do we give all this money to NATO and these other people do not?” Rubio said. “It’s easier to say that than to explain what would happen if you didn’t.”
