Rand Paul attempted to lay out his recently evolving foreign policy vision at his speech Thursday night at the Center for the National Interest. A lot of what he said may leave some scratching their heads.
He painted himself as a “conservative realist” who, despite his reputation as a critic of interventionism, backs the “war on terror”: “The war on terror is not over, and America cannot disengage from the world,” he said.
“We need a foreign policy that recognizes our limits and preserves our might, a commonsense conservative realism of strength and action.”
Then in a nod to his libertarian-leaning background, Paul threw in a few notes of caution. He quoted activist Malala Yousafza’s condemnation of drone strikes, and echoed President Obama’s “not every problem is a nail” comment: “Yes, we need a hammer ready, but not every civil war is a nail.”
At one point, Paul said he objected to “wars where the best outcome is stalemate. America shouldn’t fight wars when there is no plan for victory.”
But at the same time, he seemed to contradict that very mantra with his support for action in Iraq’s conflict with ISIS, to which he sees no definite end: “Although I support the call for defeating and destroying ISIS, I doubt that a decisive victory is possible in the short term, even with the participation of the Kurds, the Iraqi government, and other moderate Arab states.”
He criticized the war in Libya as “not in our national interest” and said he would not support arming the Syrian rebels.
But he also called the war in Afghanistan “an example of a just, necessary war” and backed sanctions against Russia.
While addressing extremists who resent America, Paul held that “some anger is blowback,” but that “hatred for those outside the circle of “accepted” Islam, exists above and beyond our history of intervention overseas.”
Last month Paul defended his suddenly more hawkish foreign policy stances by remarking, “As world events change, obviously you change your analysis.”
As he and the world change, this speech was his latest effort to convince both of the two sides he’s playing to—interventionists and his anti-war supporters—that he means what he says.
