With Democrat Hillary Clinton Likely 2016 Neoconservative Standard Bearer, Republicans Should Offer a Real Alternative — Such as Rand Paul
By Doug Bandow
This article appeared in Forbes on August 18, 2014.
U.S. foreign policy is a bipartisan fiasco. George W. Bush and his neoconservative allies gave the American people Iraq, the gift that keeps on giving. Barack Obama has proved to be a slightly more reluctant warrior, but he is taking the country back into Iraq.
Sen. John McCain, the 2008 Republican nominee, appears never to have met a war that he didn’t want Americans to fight. Hillary Clinton, the unannounced Democratic front-runner for 2016, supported her husband’s misbegotten attempt at nation-building in Kosovo and led the drive for war in Libya, which is violently unraveling.
Most of Clinton’s potential GOP opponents share Washington’s bomb, invade, and occupy consensus. The only exception is Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul. He stands alone advocating a foreign policy which reflects the bitter, bloody lessons of recent years.
The Islamic State of Syria and the Levant is the latest result of Washington’s incessant and counterproductive meddling in the Middle East. Nowhere has U.S. policy been more disastrous. Indeed, what intervention, under Republican or Democratic administration, has worked well in that region in the last three or so decades?
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