The Republican consensus.

• Author: Heilbrunn, Jacob
• Position: The Realist - Foreign policy - Essay

In February 2013, Senator Rand Paul delivered a speech at the Heritage Foundation. It was called "Restoring the Founders' Vision of Foreign Policy." In it Paul sought to outline a fresh foreign-policy path for the Republican Party, which was tepidly beginning to debate the limits of intervention abroad. At the outset Paul declared, "I see the world as it is. I am a realist, not a neoconservative, nor an isolationist." He argued that radical Islam posed a threat to the United States but that the best way to defang it wasn't to engage in permanent wars in the Middle East. Instead, he invoked the shade of George F. Kennan, asserting that a containment policy toward Iran and other countries would be the most effective way of deterring America's foes:

I think all of us have the duty to ask where are the Kennans of our generation? When foreign policy has become so monolithic, so lacking in debate that Republicans and Democrats routinely pass foreign policy statements without debate and without votes, where are the calls for moderation, the calls for restraint? Anyone who questions the bipartisan consensus is immediately castigated, rebuked and their patriotism challenged. The most pressing question of the day, Iran developing nuclear weapons, is allowed to have less debate in this country than it receives in Israel. Paul's speech did not receive much attention, but the following month his thirteen-hour-long filibuster of John Brennan's nomination to become CIA director did. Paul became something of a folk hero for his rather sweeping denunciation, on civil-liberties grounds, of the Obama administration's widespread use of drones to kill suspected terrorists. Paul said he would "speak as long as it takes, until the alarm is sounded from coast to coast that our Constitution is important, that your rights to trial by jury are precious, that no American should be killed by a drone on American soil without first being charged with a crime, without first being found to be guilty by a court."

Two years later, as the Republican presidential race heats up, however, the GOP is doubling down, whether the issue is government surveillance or confronting foreign adversaries. One possible presidential aspirant at this year's Conservative Political Action Conference said this about the need to counter the virulent threat posed by the Islamic State: "When I look at spending and what we should spend money on--this or that or national defense--for me, the priority...