Rand Paul’s speech at CPAC was an opening salvo in the foreign policy debate Republicans need to have.
While others at the nation’s largest gathering of conservative activists spoke blithely about regime change in Iran, Paul learned the lessons of the Iraq war.
Those lessons aren’t simply that we invaded with too few troops or left too soon. And the alternative isn’t “isolationism” or pacifism.
Paul minced no words about the “dangerous and barbaric cult” known as ISIS. “Without question, we must now defend ourselves and American interests from this barbarous aberration of Islam,” he said. “Without question, we must be strong.”
The senator condemned “mobs burning our flag and chanting ‘death to America.'” He called for “a national defense robust enough to defend against all attacks, modern enough to deter all enemies, and nimble enough to defend our vital interests.”
But Paul also noted that some of our wars have spread chaos and jihad, not freedom and democracy. Some of the factions we’ve armed are now shooting at us with the weapons our tax dollars have paid for. And he acknowledged that the logic of limited government applies abroad as well as at home.
Paul aimed squarely at “Hillary’s war” in Libya, an example of the Democrats’ foreign policy failures that other hawkish Republicans are ill equipped to attack. He vowed to take the fight to ISIS instead of overthrowing governments that are containing or even fighting ISIS.
“Without question we must defend ourselves,” he said. “I envision an America with a National Defense unparalleled, undefeatable, and unencumbered by nation-building.”
Many other CPAC speakers contemplating a presidential bid talked tough. But their approaches would necessarily involve some degree of nation-building, or simply abandoning failed states as Obama and Hillary did in Libya.
Let the debate begin.
