CEDAR FALLS, IOWA — Rand Paul may have a foreign policy problem.
Sure, the hawkish elements of the GOP reject Paul’s views, but that’s a fight Paul is willing to have. His problem may be deeper.
Paul has a very good argument that America would be safer had his foreign policy been followed for the past 15 years. But he’s not running for president of 15 years ago. He and his supporters have a harder time arguing how his foreign policy will make America safer for the next four to eight years.
In other words: Even if you agree that Republican and Democratic foreign intervention got us into this mess, that doesn’t mean Paulian non-intervention can get us out — and Paul has trouble making the case that it can.
At the Waukee Public Library Friday morning, I asked Paul about putting boots on the ground to fight the Islamic State. Maybe the calculus might be different in fighting the Islamic State than fighting Gadhafi and Hussein, I suggested. Paul answered: “The same people who want boots on the ground in ISIS wanted regime change” in Iraq and Libya.
Here in Cedar Falls, Rand Paul had a bar event Friday night. I asked a few Paul supporters if his foreign policy was central to their support for him. They all said yes. I asked, why? Every one of them began their answer in a past tense.
“The conflicts of this world have been caused by American intervention in other countries’ affairs,” said Jacob, an elementary school teacher. But does that insight help us fight the Islamic State, I asked. Islamic State violence against the West “is a response” to U.S. occupation, Jacob responded.
Alex Staudt from the University of Iowa, when I asked him what he liked about Paul’s foreign policy, also immediately went to Paul’s opposition to the Iraq and Libya wars. He pointed out that our regime changes there created a vacuum into which the Islamic State and other terrorists ran, making us weaker. Fine, but what’s your answer as to how we handle the Islamic State?
“I don’t really have one,” Staudt said.
Staudt is basically a guy at a bar, and guys in bars aren’t required to have an answer about the Islamic State. Presidential candidates are. When you try to get Rand Paul’s answer — What would you do about the Islamic State? — he always begins by pointing out how the Islamic State got there. That’s what he did when I asked him at Waukee on Friday.
It’s a pattern. Read what Paul said at the Republican debate in September:
I’ve made my career as being an opponent of the Iraq War. I was opposed to the Syria war. I was opposed to arming people who are our enemies.
Iran is now stronger because Hussein is gone. Hussein was the great bulwark and counterbalance to the Iranians. So when we complain about the Iranians, you need to remember that the Iraq War made it worse.
When Jake Tapper asked Paul how to handle the Islamic State, here was how he began his answer:
If you want boots on the ground, and you want them to be our sons and daughters, you got 14 other choices. There will always be a Bush or Clinton for you, if you want to go back to war in Iraq.
But the thing is, the first war was a mistake. And I’m not sending our sons and our daughters back to Iraq. The war didn’t work. We can amplify those who live there.
Paul does, in fact, have an Islamic State strategy. Interestingly, it’s similar to Hillary Clinton’s: The U.S. provides support for Kurds and others willing to fight the Islamic State, but the boots on the ground against the Islamic State shouldn’t be ours. (Hillary believes in bombs-not-boots, the war strategy of her husband and her former boss, President Obama — what I call Drive-By War.)
At Waukee, after I pressed him, Paul laid out his view going forward. It involved arming Kurds. He added this:
“While ISIS is a menace, the ultimate battle is civilized Islam needs to defeat barbaric Islam… Unless the boots on the ground are Muslim,” Paul says, there can be no lasting change or peace. “Do we have the military capacity to destroy ISIS? Yes. If Marco gets elected, he’ll bomb the heck out of ISIS, and you’ll get it all rising back up in a decade.”
Paul’s foreign policy problem may boil down to this: His non-interventionism may have been the right prescription for 2001 through 2014 — our regime changes created vacuums which were filled by something worse than the murderous dictators.
But how helpful is that insight when you’re trying to fight the “something worse”? The Islamic State isn’t really a stable regime. It really does want to attack the U.S. and our allies. It’s a different sort of enemy than Hussein and Gadhafi. The responses will be different — and the better approaches this time around may not be that different from what Paul’s rivals are offering.
In other words, Paul’s foreign policy advantage doesn’t apply as much today as it did in the past. That may be why he and his supporters immediately pivot to the past. But voters will be looking for a foreign policy of the future.
Timothy P. Carney, The Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
