Rand Paul's strategic ambiguity: an unusual foreign policy stance has unusual political perils.

• Author: Doherty, Brian

Rand Paul is campaigning for president as a different kind of Republican. Since entering the U.S. Senate in 2011, he has staked out unorthodox positions on foreign policy and civil liberties, rejecting what he and many of his fans see as recklessly interventionist militarism. The GOP brand, he wrote in his 2011 book The Tea Party Goes to Washington, has become "tainted by neoconservative ideology."

But in the run-up to the Kentucky senator's April 7 announcement that he was officially running for president, Paul engaged in a series of rhetorical and parliamentary maneuvers that left many anti-interventionists openly worried about a politically inspired foreign policy drift.

On March 9, Paul signed a controversial open letter to Iran's leaders by hawkish Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) that was widely seen as an attempt to undermine the Obama administration's efforts to reach a peaceful settlement on nuclear production and economic sanctions. On March 25, he proposed a budget amendment to increase military spending by $190 billion over just the next two years, a jarring idea from someone who has previously backed significant defense cuts and an audit of the Pentagon.

And in his announcement speech itself, Paul devoted less energy to his critique of nation-building than to a fire-breathing assertion that American prosperity and freedom "can only be achieved if we defend against enemies who are dead set on attacking us....The enemy is radical Islam. You can't get around it....I will do whatever it takes to defend America from these haters of mankind. We need a national defense robust enough to defend against all attack, modem enough to deter all enemies, and nimble enough to defend our vital interests."

Some Paul supporters were alarmed. Daniel Larison of The American Conservative, long an admirer, lamented in March that "it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish him from the rest of his party on the issues that were supposed to set him apart, and so he is bound to receive less support as long as that is the case." The firebrand Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com, who has previously defended Paul against libertarian criticism, complained in an April Los Angeles Times op-ed that "For the life of me, I can't figure out what he really believes--where he really stands, especially when it comes to foreign policy." Even at Rare, a Paul-friendly news and commentary site where former Paul aide Jack Hunter is politics editor, a headline called the Cotton letter signing "a step too far."

The Paul campaign had ready responses to the specific critiques. The Cotton letter, it said, was merely a useful reminder to the president that he can't unilaterally make vital foreign policy decisions due to the constitutional separation of powers Paul has long championed. The $190 billion military spending amendment, explained senior Paul campaign staffer Doug Stafford, was matched to a similarly priced amendment by presidential rival Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.)--only Paul's, unlike Rubio's, came with matching spending cuts of the same amount. "This amendment is to lay down a marker that if you believe we need more funding for national defense, you should show how you would pay for it," Stafford wrote in a statement to the press about the amendment. "We can't just keep borrowing more money from China to send to Pakistan. And we can't keep paying for even vital things like national defense on a credit card."

Anti-interventionist skeptics might not be mollified by such talk of subtle gamesmanship, especially in the absence (as of press time) of Paul's actual proposed number for next year's military spending. Many remain puzzled by his support, announced last fall, for limited air strikes against ISIS. (The senator says they are necessary to protect U.S. diplomatic missions overseas.)

Once he was in direct competition with other Republicans on the campaign trail, however, candidate Paul again showed signs of anti-interventionist foreign policy gumption. At a New Hampshire GOP meeting later in April, the senator thundered about how "the other Republicans will criticize the president and Hillary Clinton for their foreign policy, but they would just have done the same thing--just 10 times over....There's a group of folks in our party who would have troops in six countries right now, maybe more."

In a late April fundraising letter, Paul tried to rally his own core supporters by complaining that "many in our party--including many announced and rumored Presidential candidates--would double down on the failures of the Obama-Clinton foreign policy of reckless engagement. Will you stand with me as I fight back against the irresponsible policy of wild foreign intervention?"

Many of Paul's once and future supporters would like to stand with Rand. But it still seems to be an open question exactly what kind of foreign policy, and what specific interventions, a President Paul might pursue. And that may well be exactly the way he and his campaign want it.

'That's Not Flip-Flopping'

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