Senator Marco Rubio has been a strident critic of President Obama’s foreign policy from the start, and nobody except a radical isolationist is likely to believe that there is any such thing as an “Rubio-Obama” foreign policy. There is, however, a long history of Senator Rand Paul and Obama saying essentially the same things on foreign policy, and — even worse — offering the same appallingly bad analysis.

In their approach to Iraq, for example, Obama has taken most of a year to realize that the jihadist onslaught is much more than a civil war, and that the Islamic State safe haven in Syria and Iraq must be stamped out eventually before those safe havens can strike us here at home as they did on 9/11. That puts him just a few steps ahead of Rand Paul, who is more worried about the safe haven he thinks we created in Syria (and should leave alone) then about the one the Islamic State is creating for itself in an expanding swath of the Middle East.

A good study is to compare the statements made by President Obama on Iraq and the Islamic State back on June 19, 2014, and the near-simultaneous Wall Street Journal op-ed on the same topic by Senator Paul. For example, see if you can you guess which of the two said this:

Let me address both of these. First, we should not put any U.S. troops on the ground in Iraq, unless it is to secure or evacuate U.S. personnel and diplomatic facilities. And while we may not completely rule out air strikes, there are many questions that need to be addressed first.

That vacillating came from Senator Paul.

Both Obama and Paul also characterized the conflict in Iraq as a “civil war” — even though it is actually Syria’s civil war spreading to other countries, as many of us predicted would happen if the war was not contained. Obama gets credit for at least mentioning the danger of terrorist safe havens, which Paul doesn’t mention in the WSJ piece (and hasn’t anywhere else from what I can tell), so at least Obama is slowly piecing together how 9/11 came to pass.

Meanwhile, Paul stays busy inciting people to believe that the government is listening in on their cell phones without warrants (which it isn’t, unless you’re talking to terrorists abroad) and suggesting that President Bush went to war in Iraq in order to make billions for Halliburton (which is an obscene slander).

A lot of people agree with these sentiments, and Paul is very good at voicing what people are thinking — contradictions and conspiracy theories and all. What people should be asking themselves is whether this is someone who understands history and national security well enough for these difficult and dangerous times.