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Senator Rand Paul has been making the rounds in recent days touting deeper U.S. engagement with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. It’s often the case when Senator Paul talks about foreign policy his pronouncements are a curious admixture of odd conspiracy theories, pacifist banalities, and ahistorical analogies—all delivered with the confident condescension of someone who doesn’t have any idea what he’s talking about.
So it is with Paul’s lonely effort to provide intellectual backing for Donald Trump’s instinctive desire to make nice with the increasingly provocative regime run by the anti-American former KGB agent. Examples of Paul’s foolishness are legion but the most revealing came in an interview that the senator conducted on August 16, 2018, with The Liberty Report, an internet television show hosted by his father, libertarian gadfly and former congressman Ron Paul.
Senator Paul has lately made a cause of conciliation by concession—seeking to reverse sanctions on Russian lawmakers, blocking proposed sanctions on Russian oil interests, and more broadly, preventing punitive measures on Putin’s Russia in favor of dialogue and conversation. These efforts build on his past work downplaying Putin’s aggression and attacking those who highlight it.
In late February 2014, with Russian troops on “high alert” and amassed on the border with Ukraine, Paul spoke out not against the Russian strongman who’d put them there, but against conservatives who warned about Putin’s expansionism and the possibility of an imminent invasion. “Some on our side are so stuck in the Cold War era that they want to tweak Russia all the time and I don’t think that is a good idea,” he said. For good measure, he echoed Russian propaganda messaging at the time, that “Ukraine has a long history of being, you know, either part of the Soviet Union or within that sphere—common language, etcetera, so I don’t think it behooves us to tell the Ukraine what to do.”
Is it any wonder, then, that Senator Paul was welcomed with open arms by Putin’s allies on his recent trip to Russia? Not really. But Paul nonetheless sounded surprised when he told his father he’d been “lucky enough to get meetings” with Russian lawmakers. Paul reported that while he doesn’t take everything he’s told as the unalloyed truth, he found that Russian legislators “are more open to dialogue and do want to meet and do want better relations with the United States.” He told his father that his travels in Russia made clear to him that while most Russians today might not find things perfect, they prefer life under Vladimir Putin to the old Soviet Union and the “difficult time” of the “crazy, Wild West” 1990s that followed the dissolution of the Soviet bloc.
Senator Paul recounted for his father a meeting he’d had with the head of the Libertarian Party of Russia who, the younger Paul reported, “has been getting crowds of 10-, 20-, 30,000 people to show up” to hear the libertarian message in Russia. “It’s not perfect, he’s not allowed on the ballot there,” Senator Paul explained, but “at least he was able to speak with us while we were there.”
“It’s not perfect” might qualify as an understatement, as Putin’s government rather routinely targets for assassination, at home and abroad, his political opponents, real and perceived. Maybe such understatement is part of Paul’s determined effort to avoid tweaking Russia all the time.
Paul acknowledges that Russia “probably” interfered with the 2016 presidential election, but he downplays this meddling as inconsequential while offering the kind of absurd framing for which Kentucky’s junior senator has become famous. “Do I think that they probably hacked into Hillary Clinton’s emails? Yes. But they are never, ever going to admit to that. But if I were to weigh hacking into Hillary Clinton’s emails with nuclear war, they sort of pale in comparison.”
Either we let Russia’s hacking slide or we have nuclear war. It’s the kind of logic that leads to arguments like the one Paul offers as a follow-up.
In rapid succession, the senator says that a) sanctions on Russia haven't done any good and poison relations, b) the reaction to Russian meddling in our elections, including the sanctions, have made clear to them that their continued meddling in our elections would harm US-Russia relations, and, c) sanctions on Russia will have the opposite of their intended effect.
“You can try to put sanctions on Russia and punish them but their response is to become more firm in their resolve not to do something,” Paul explained. “Like election meddling: In all likelihood, yes, Russia probably did hack into Hillary Clinton’s emails. I don’t think they expected the reaction in our country or how big a deal it would become. But I think they’re seeing now that if they did this, it’s backfired on them.”
Why have they come to this conclusion? In large part, because of U.S. sanctions and other punitive measures.
“They’ve got worse relations, less dialogue, less trade, more sanctions—and so I think it’s important for Russia to understand what’s going on in our country, and I think some of it is hysteria in our country, in order for them to decide because countries that have the ability to spy will continue to spy and countries that have the ability to hack into computers will continue to do this. What we need to do is to make sure they understand that if they want better relations that it’s not in their best interest. ... They’re annoyed with the sanctions, but they’ll actually resist change more with the sanctions.”
In short: Sanctions don’t work, sanctions have worked here, but sanctions won’t work in the future.
If logic isn’t Senator Paul’s strength, neither is history. In arguing for leniency on Putin’s Russia, Paul invoked Ronald Reagan’s nuclear talks with Mikhail Gorbachev, whom he met during his recent visit. Trump needs to buck the remnants of Cold War orthodoxy if he’s to have any hope of forging better relations with Russia, Paul argues. This means, first, rejecting the kind of punitive measures favored by the hawks in both political parties. And, second, it means ignoring the kinds of criticism that Ronald Reagan got for his meetings with Mikhail Gorbachev. To make his point, Paul turns to his favorite villain: the neocons.
“For Reagan and Gorbachev to come together, Reagan had to defy some neoconservative criticism, the Bill Kristols and a whole, you know, ah, group of the neoconservatives who criticized Reagan for talking to Gorbachev. Reagan had to rise above that, rise out of the orthodoxy of the Cold War to meet with Gorbachev.”
Set aside the rather significant fact that no one was more responsible for the “orthodoxy of the Cold War” than Ronald Reagan. Ignore the fact that the Cold War “orthodoxy” Paul rejects—the kind of confrontational rhetoric Reagan preferred and the aggressive anti-Communist policies that defined his foreign policy—gave the United States precisely those advantages that allowed diplomacy to succeed. And focus instead on Bill Kristol.
Bill Kristol wasn’t leading criticism of Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy in the 1980s. He was working in Reagan’s administration.
