As both Trump-deranged Democrats and “Never Trump” Republican hawks teamed up to attack Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., this week over his trip to Russia, many believing it was a temporary stunt to defend President Trump post-Helsinki, the Washington Examiner reported Thursday that the senator had actually been planning this trip for some time.
“According to sources, Paul’s trip has been in the works for nearly six months and supported by Trump team,” the Washington Examiner‘s Paul Bedard reported.
So if Paul’s Russia excursion was some transparent last-minute photo-op, as his critics say it is, why did he plan his trip last winter?
If Paul’s Trump-obsessed critics would take off their crazy goggles a minute, the answer becomes clear.
The libertarian-leaning Republican has long had a consistent vision of what he believes foreign policy should look like, including U.S.-Russia relations. In what many observers considered his first major foreign policy speech in 2013, at a time when the senator was rumored to be considering a presidential run, Paul told The Heritage Foundation:
A year later, presenting “The Case for Conservative Realism” at the Center for the National Interest in 2014, Paul was critical of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intervention in Ukraine and supported U.S. sanctions on Russia, but also stressed the indispensable necessity of engaging foreign countries, even those perceived as enemies.
Vox’s Zack Beauchamp wrote of Paul’s 2014 talk, “Rand Paul just gave one of the most important foreign policy speeches in decades.” Beauchamp said of the senator’s realist foreign policy views, “Paul is signaling that, when he runs for president in 2016, he isn’t going to move toward the Republican foreign policy consensus; he’s going to run at it, with a battering ram.”
Beauchamp would add, “If he wins, he could remake the Republican Party as we know it.”
Indeed. But of course, Rand Paul didn’t win. Trump did.
Still, many say that today Trump is remaking the Republican Party, including on foreign policy. Many have noted the similarities and overlap between Trump’s foreign policy impulses and Paul’s longstanding positions.
If the dots still aren’t connected for some, let me be more explicit.
Paul was in Russia not to do Trump or Putin or anyone else’s bidding, but to encourage precisely the kind of engagement and diplomatic relations he would have pursued if he had become president.
The senator well known for demanding congressional declarations of war, opposing NATO expansion, criticizing sending U.S. military aid abroad, and being against arming radical Islamic terrorists or “rebels,” is simply rounding out the important diplomatic ingredient of his overall realist foreign policy vision.
With Russia right now, thanks to this president, a better diplomacy is possible. With another Republican president in the far more hawkish conventional GOP of recent years, it likely wouldn’t be possible, as Beauchamp rightly noted.
Why wouldn’t the realist Paul make the most of this historic opportunity to encourage engagement?
Washington Post reporter Karoun Demirjian got it right Wednesday with this headline: “Trump challenges traditional GOP antipathy to Russia — and Rand Paul is an ally.”
Demirjian added, “A visit to Moscow this week by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) marked the sharpest endorsement yet of Trump’s polarizing policy toward Russia.”
It’s primarily “polarizing” because the “national security community” in Washington has long been more eager to take aggressive action than to engage in diplomacy. These are not only the same critics who blast Trump and Paul today as somehow betraying the U.S. for engaging Russia, but hawks in Reagan’s time also criticized the Gipper harshly (National Review called his nuclear weapons reduction treaty “Reagan’s Suicide Pact”) for meeting with then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1986.
Reagan understood that diplomacy was strength, not weakness. On Tuesday, Paul met with Mikhail Gorbachev.
Paul said in a statement, “President Gorbachev was instrumental in bringing down the Iron Curtain and restoring ties with the West. … Our conversation further encouraged me that open dialogue between our two nations does not have to be a thing of the past.”
No, it doesn’t. Hopefully President Trump will continue to pursue diplomatic relations with Russia and other nations. Americans interested in peace should hope Sen. Rand Paul continues to purse them too.
Jack Hunter (@jackhunter74) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is the former political editor of Rare.us and co-authored the 2011 book The Tea Party Goes to Washington with Sen. Rand Paul.
