The success of Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy was predicated on three qualities: He tried hard to be morally consistent; he had an innate sense of strategy; and he was a great communicator. It may be too soon to tell whether Florida senator Marco Rubio is walking in Reagan’s footsteps, but he certainly seems to be headed in the right direction.

The test will be how Rubio deals with the perennial dilemmas of American foreign policy, specifically the long-running tension between realism and idealism that Henry Kissinger describes in Diplomacy (1994). Rubio believes that the two are not necessarily in conflict. “I’m

…