Much has been made of the foreign policy defects of leading Republican candidates. It’s worrisome that Ben Carson can’t nail down the details of which countries are meddling where in the Middle East, and that Donald Trump believes that his background cutting deals with Al Sharpton in New York City prepares him for summits with Vladimir Putin. But ignorance can be remedied. Much more dangerous is a rigid and unreflective ideology, a pig-headed general that sits in your head and insists on re-fighting expired wars. It was precisely such an ideology that Americans sniffed out and rejected in John McCain — giving us instead President Obama. If we don’t want four more years of executive amnesties and radical Supreme Court appointees, we must be careful whom we nominate.

In a bruising general election campaign, the Democrats will take the gloves off, and won’t be above using scare tactics akin to the “Daisy” commercial that cast Barry Goldwater as a nuclear warmonger.

And Senator Marco Rubio, on so many issues a really appealing candidate, has handed the Democrats all the ammunition they would need. This week, Rubio responded to the quarrel between two nasty foreign regimes, Russia and Turkey, by calling on the United States to “defend” Turkey against a nuclear-armed Russia. He would not grant that Vladimir Putin might have a point in taking tough action against the Islamists fighting in Syria. Not after calling Vladimir Putin a “gangster,” with whom the U.S. cannot even negotiate, as Rubio said in a debate. Will Democrats let Rubio cruise on such assertions, when even Ronald Reagan never foreswore talks with the totalitarian Soviets? Or will they paint Rubio the same way they painted Goldwater, goading a war-weary public to vote Democrat again?

Islamist Turkey is Hostile to Israel and Dangerous to Europe

Forget politics for a moment. Should we even side with Turkey, which shot down a Russian plane for momentarily violating Turkish airspace (as Turkey violates Greece’s hundreds of times each year)? Turkey is the country that brought you the Armenian genocide, the Assyrian genocide, the Greek genocide … and still to this day denies that such massacres happened. In fact, the regime in Turkey has revived the Ottoman uniforms and ceremonies that accompanied such atrocities. Imagine if the German government today still used Nazi symbols and denied the Holocaust. …

Welcome to Turkey, the nation that ought to be accepting Syria’s refugees, since it’s the “first safe country” which they can reach. Instead it is dumping them on Europe, the better to fill that continent’s cities with loyal Sunni Muslims, who can worship at radical mosques funded by Turkey’s close ally, Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, the Turkish government accuses worried Europeans of intolerance, even as it tightens the screws on its own, long-suffering Kurdish population and prevents its tragic Christian remnant from rebuilding their crumbling churches in places like Ephesus.

Turkey is run by Recep Erdogan, a Machiavellian Islamist who is bent on transforming the country from a quasi-secular state into a huge, Sunni Muslim powerhouse linked with fanatical imams in Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Erdogan is helping intolerant Sunni radicals committed to conquering all of Syria, and crushing the religious minorities who cling to Bashar Assad’s regime for protection — the Christians, the Alawites, and the Shiites. Most or all of them likely will be killed or cleansed from Syria if Erdogan gets his way, as a million Christians were ethnically cleansed from Iraq, the last time the U.S. intervened to further “democratic change” in the Arab world. It is intolerant Sunni refugees, not the thugs of ISIS, who are keeping Christians out of UN refugee camps in Syria, beating and killing Christians who try to enter. The Sunnis want virtually all the refugee slots for themselves, and so far they are getting away with it. If the U.S. simply shrugs and accepts the ethnically cleansed refugee influx, we are abetting the persecution of Christians.

None of the Sunni militias currently fighting Assad is committed to preserving religious freedom in Syria, including the so-called “moderate” factions that Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush and Lindsey Graham want the U.S. to fund or fight for. Only the Kurds (whom the Turks oppress), and for all his flaws, Assad, offer any hope for religious minorities. And Russia is helping Assad, by bombing ISIS and other Islamists. So Turkey has picked a fight with Russia.

Turkey is a member of NATO, which makes it technically an ally of the very European countries Turkey is inundating with Muslim migrants. Should France, Germany and Poland be ready to go to war on behalf of this increasingly radical Sunni regime, against a still-powerful Russia? Should we? And for what?

Yes, it’s true that Putin behaved abominably in Ukraine, which raised fears in Poland and other U.S. allies of renewed Russian expansion. But right now, which do you think the Poles, Hungarians and Germans are more worried about: the chance that Russia might annex more cities in Ukraine, transferring them from one corrupt regime to another, or the million Sunni Muslim migrants Turkey is sending to Europe as colonists this year, to fill up Europe’s welfare rolls and offer future recruits for ISIS and al Qaeda?

Has Marco Rubio really thought all this through? It is time for him to drop the reflexive “toughness” against a Russia that is our rival but need not be our bitter enemy. Americans want our nation to be strong, but they don’t want to risk the lives of our soldiers in a war on behalf of Islamists like these, who spotted Putin’s airmen parachuting to safety, gunned at least one of them down with American weapons, filmed the war crime and shared it on YouTube.