Rand Paul's Sound Foreign Policy Instincts

Rand Paul's Sound Foreign Policy Instincts

09/19/14

W. James Antle III

Domestic Politics, United States

"Looking back, is there any doubt Paul’s political judgment was correct?"

Rand Paul’s critics and the media, not necessarily mutually exclusive categories, have begun to question whether the senator from Kentucky has a coherent foreign policy.

This growing skepticism certainly matters, but of more immediate importance is that some of Paul’s supporters and sympathizers are starting to wonder the same thing.

As Paul has sounded increasingly hawkish against the terrorist group known as ISIS, many libertarians and conservatives have started to speculate the 2016 presidential possibility has gone over to the dark side.

Paul has been down this road before. When he joined with all but four Senate Republicans in voting to delay Chuck Hagel’s confirmation as secretary of defense, the reaction from many erstwhile admirers was fierce.

“If Rand Paul persists on going demagogic on Hagel,” wrote American Conservative co-founder Scott McConnell at the time, “he will have established beyond any serious doubt that regardless of who his father is, he is Bill Kristol and Jennifer Rubin’s boy.”

In response to such criticism, Paul suggested some libertarians and antiwar conservatives were missing the bigger picture.

“Everybody is really excited about Hagel, but the most important question and the most important constitutional issue is whether or not the president can kill American citizens through the drone strike program on U.S. soil,” he told me in an interview last year. “That’s a much bigger question than Hagel.”

And while Hagel’s decisive turn against the Iraq war galvanized an antiwar right that for most of the Bush administration had no visible political champions, Paul said that some people were exaggerating how antiwar Hagel’s voting record had actually been.

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http://nationalinterest.org/feature/rand-pauls-sound-fp-instincts-11310