Restoring the Founders’ Vision of Foreign Policy

[Valin]

Heritage Foundation:

2/6/13

 

Our country presently faces national security challenges from hostile nations throughout the world. Nations like Iran and North Korea are troublesome to their neighbors and the United States. Unfortunately, our current policies have not effectively dealt with these serious threats.

 

At this lecture, Senator Rand Paul will discuss his vision of a foreign policy that respects the plain language of our Constitution, the legal powers of Congress and the proper duties of the Commander-in-Chief. Senator Paul will map out a foreign policy vision in which America can better avoid never-ending conflict and protracted commitments

 

Join us as Senator Paul outlines how a constitutionally conservative foreign policy would better serve and protect the United States.

 

(Click On Link For Vid)

[Valin]

Rand Paul’s Side Effects

Inaction, too, has its consequences.

Frederick W. Kagan

2/7/13

 

It is hard to square the speech of Senator Rand Paul (R., Ky.) at the Heritage Foundation yesterday with the global and political context in which he spoke. The speech was an erudite exposition of a foreign policy of restraint, retrenchment, and containment as described by George Kennan at the start of the Cold War. It was a warning against foreign entanglements and the threat posed to the separation of powers by the presidential practice of avoiding formal declarations of war when sending American troops overseas. It was, above all, a call to avoid backing ourselves into a corner that would make war with Iran inevitable. It was, in other words, a more artful defense of the foreign policy of the Obama administration than that administration has ever made itself.

 

(Snip)

 

The real problem with the senator’s theory is that he misunderstands the nature of the Sunni Salafist challenge. Salafism — or radical Islamism — is not simply an ideology. It is a heresy. It has emerged in various forms throughout Muslim history — and been rejected as heretical every time because it argues for the right of self-defined “virtuous” Muslims to identify as apostate and kill other Muslims deemed to be practicing their religion incorrectly. The Muslim community has consistently rejected this mangling of the words of the Koran and the meaning of the traditions of the Prophet, despite attempts by vocal and violent minorities to resurrect it periodically. The threat from al-Qaeda and affiliated movements — and from other Salafist groups — has taken, as it usually does, the form of an insurgency within the Muslim world against which almost all Sunni Muslim states are now fighting.

 

(Snip)

 

But Senator Paul’s most important intellectual error lies precisely in his notion of side effects. American support to the anti-Soviet mujahideen in Afghanistan contributed to the rise of al-Qaeda. But it was America’s complete and total inaction and disinterest in Afghanistan in the 1990s that allowed that movement to establish itself there to such a degree that it could plan and conduct the 9/11 attacks. Inactivity, too, has side effects, and those must be weighed as seriously as the side effects of proposed actions.

[Valin]

Rand Paul and Republican Foreign Policy

Victor Davis Hanson

2/7/13

 

Rand Paul's at the Heritage Foundation yesterday was a heartfelt attempt to reassert the traditional Republican embrace of realism and skepticism about nation-building over supposedly unnecessarily interventionist neo-conservatism. He was trying to outline, I think, a strong U.S. overseas presence that is not afraid to use force to promote our interests, and which can dovetail with democratic advocacy, but one that nonetheless does not find itself in perpetual interventions that do not play to our military strengths and may prove counter-productive in the long-run. Who could not support that vision?

 

 

(Snip)

 

I don't think support for the removal of Saddam Hussein (authorized on 23 writs by both houses of Congresses, and supported by a wide array of liberals from Thomas Friedman and Andrew Sullivan to Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, as well as conservatives from George Will to the late Bill Buckley; cf. the Clinton-era support for regime change) is synonymous to a neoconservatism that is caricatured by the idea of endless war or supposed lockstep support for the Likud Party. Many of us who supported the Iraq war did so to rid the world of a maniacal dictator far more dangerous and genocidal than Slobodan Milosevic, and yet did not support intervention in either Syria or Libya, and not because Barack Obama would be the architect of such adventures.

 

(Snip)

 

In short, Paul, I think, was trying to distance himself from both caricatured neoconservatism and the impressions of his own father's libertarian isolationism, and searching for a bipartisan sobriety that would protect our allies but not intervene on behalf of unsure insurgents. I applaud his efforts — as long as we realize that the Iraq war did not lead to endless subsequent neoconservative interventionism and that no-nonsense realism often leads to things like the Taliban in Afghanistan and the mess after the 1991 war.