Colin Powell spent the final years of his life haunted by his February 2003 presentation to the United Nations Security Council, claiming the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq justified military action. It was a shameful performance in which he laid out the phony case—aluminum tubes, satellite photos and the WMDs that never were—with the full moral authority of a four-star general who’d bled for his country.

Before he died, Powell called backing the Iraq war a “blot” on his record. It was a stain he could never quite wash out.

Marco Rubio, at the moment, surely has no such regrets. It seems unlikely he will in the future either. That, more than anything, is what separates these two men, and it tells a sad story about how far U.S. diplomacy has fallen.

It’s tempting to see similarities between them. Both served as Secretary of State. Both are trailblazing men of color: Powell was the first Black American to hold the office; Rubio is the first Hispanic. Both were considered reasonable moderates in their party, though in Rubio’s case this means prior to his confirmation to Trump’s Cabinet. Since then, of course, he’s been chugging the MAGA Kool-Aid like he’s at one of Pete Hegseth’s frat parties.

They were the credentialed grown-ups brought in to reassure a skeptical world that their president—men who ran foreign policy on instinct and ego, each with........

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