Toward a libertarian foreign policy: Rand Paul moves the ball on a long- overdue project.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: From the Top

IN OCTOBER 2010, one month before a historic wave of Tea Party Republicans swept into power, Washington's conservative establishment banded together to spread an urgent message to any would-be budget cutters on or near Capitol Hill: Hands off the military, kids.

The $80 million Heritage Foundation, the $30 million American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and the $2 million Foreign Policy Initiative--neoconservative titan William Kristol's latest outfit (partial motto: "strategic overreach is not the problem and retrenchment is not the solution")--combined forces that month to produce a document tided "Defending Defense: Setting the Record Straight on U.S. Military Spending Requirements." In it, the establishmentarians lamented "two decades of under-funding the military," celebrated the "bipartisan consensus" about "America's global leadership role," and cautioned deficit hawks that "defense is not the source of the federal government's fiscal woes."

Kristol, AEI President Arthur Brooks, and Heritage President Ed Feulner underlined their message in a Wall Street Journal essay, arguing that "anyone seeking to restore our fiscal health should look at entitlements first, not across-the-board cuts aimed at our men and women in uniform." The lead editorial in the next issue of Kristol's Weekly Standard warned incoming House Republicans to avoid a "myopic focus on government spending." James Jay Carafano, vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at Heritage, predicted in The Daily Caller that the Tea Party's hawkish faction would win out over its foreign policy "libertarians." Referring to Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), a two-time candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, and Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), a longtime critic of bloated military budgets, Carafano explained that "the Barney Frank-Ron Paul project that calls for slashing Pentagon spending is close to a Looney-Tune alliance."

You can see why the old guard was getting defensive about defense. Many of the new breed--including Sens. Mike Lee (Utah), Pat Toomey (Pa.), Marco Rubio (Fla.), and Rand Paul (Ky.), Ron Paul's son--came to prominence only after vanquishing establishment-favored Republican moderates in primary elections, often in campaigns that focused explicitly on cutting, as opposed to limiting the growth of, government spending. And some--especially Paul and Rep. Justin Amash (Mich.)--bucked recent conservative orthodoxy by talking openly of cutting military...