Brian Doherty article on Rand's foreign policy in Reason Magazine

[jct74]

This will appear in the July 2015 issue.


Rand Paul's Strategic Ambiguity
An unusual foreign policy stance has unusual political perils.

Brian Doherty
Jun. 16, 2015 7:00 am

Rand Paul is campaigning for president as a different kind of Republican. Since entering the U.S. Senate in 2011, he has staked out unorthodox positions on foreign policy and civil liberties, rejecting what he and many of his fans see as recklessly interventionist militarism. The GOP brand, he wrote in his 2011 book The Tea Party Goes to Washington, has become "tainted by neoconservative ideology."

But in the run-up to the Kentucky senator's April 7 announcement that he was officially running for president, Paul engaged in a series of rhetorical and parliamentary maneuvers that left many anti-interventionists openly worried about a politically inspired foreign policy drift.

...

Once he was in direct competition with other Republicans on the campaign trail, however, candidate Paul again showed signs of anti-interventionist foreign policy gumption. At a New Hampshire GOP meeting later in April, the senator thundered about how "the other Republicans will criticize the president and Hillary Clinton for their foreign policy, but they would just have done the same thing-just 10 times over...There's a group of folks in our party who would have troops in six countries right now, maybe more."

In a late April fundraising letter, Paul tried to rally his own core supporters by complaining that "many in our party—including many announced and rumored Presidential candidates—would double down on the failures of the Obama-Clinton foreign policy of reckless engagement. Will you stand with me as I fight back against the irresponsible policy of wild foreign intervention?"

Many of Paul's once and future supporters would like to stand with Rand. But it still seems to be an open question exactly what kind of foreign policy, and what specific interventions, a President Paul might pursue. And that may well be exactly the way he and his campaign want it.

...

read more:
http://reason.com/archives/2015/06/16/rand-pauls-strategic-ambiguity

single page:
http://reason.com/archives/2015/06/16/rand-pauls-strategic-ambiguity/print

[randomname]

Very good, balanced article. Seems he has a great team of foreign policy advisors.

[PierzStyx]

>The younger Paul seems to have made a clean break from the foreign policy thinkers who influenced his father, including the likes of University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape, author of Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicidal Terrorism, which blamed that phenomenon more on occupation and less on radical Islam, and former CIA agent Michael Scheuer, author of Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror. No one from Ron Paul World is part of Rand Paul's current foreign policy team. In early April, I spoke with three of the people he has brought in to advise him instead.

Well, that certainly is [I]concerning.

[timosman]

>Well, that certainly is concerning.

Yes, for the neocons.

[randomname]

Associating with them would be political poison.

[georgiaboy]

Very good, balanced article. Seems he has a great team of foreign policy advisors.

qft.

A few snips I found interesting.


Paul's goal, he and his advisers insist, is to lead his party somewhere genuinely new, not to jump on the existing interventionist bandwagon. He wants to reform the GOP's foreign policy inclinations, to walk a path somewhere between the extremes. On one side is the "troops are for the homeland only" mentality, often called "isolationist" by its opponents. On the other is the "the world is full of crazed menaces who need to be taken out with military force" mentality, often called "neoconservative" by its critics. Paul's bet is that he can eschew both in favor of something better.


Paul delivered a second, more polished speech defining "conservative realism" to the Center for the National Interest in October 2014. More than one of his foreign policy advisers has named that organization as the prime institutional and intellectual home for what could be called Rand Paulian foreign policy thinking. Founded in 1994 by Richard Nixon and called the Nixon Center until 2011, the center now publishes the journal National Interest.


Elise Jordan has worked at the International Security Assistance Force headquarters in Afghanistan, and she has been a speechwriter for former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. (Her late husband was Michael Hastings, a journalist critical of the Pentagon's practice in Afghanistan, whose reporting led to Gen. Stanley McChrystal losing his job running U.S. operations there.) Jordan grants that "from a communication standpoint, if someone is always ready to go to war, that's easy to communicate. But having a nuanced, thoughtful way of looking at the world on a case-by-case basis—using a commonsense conservative realism—it's very important for foreign policy to move in this direction."