The most remarkable aspect of Senator Rand Paul’s “conservative realism” speech on October 23 in New York was that it was seen as remarkable at all. For the fact is that, despite the hubbub about the speech in outlets such as Vox and the Washington Post, much of the case that Paul was making would have fallen squarely within the broad mainstream of Republican thinking in the pre-9/11 era. A GOP politician’s making similar points even 15 years ago, let alone 30 or 40, would have been hardly worth mentioning.
Thus Paul’s statement that “America shouldn’t fight wars when there is no plan for victory,” for instance, echoes the Weinberger/Powell Doctrine formulated by Republicans in the post-Vietnam era to distinguish themselves from the Democrats who they (and many Americans) believed had allowed the nation to be drawn into a searingly painful war without any real vision for how to end it. During the Cold War, many Republicans thought of quagmires such as Vietnam as “Democrat wars,” as Bob Dole put it in the 1976 vice-presidential debate. By comparison, George H. W. Bush’s decisive and clearly defined victory in the Persian Gulf War of 1990–91 was regularly held up by Republicans as the classic example of a “Republican war” — one in which, as GOP statesmen such as James Baker put it, the United States triumphantly achieved its aims with few casualties and ended up in the financial black owing to the active support of coalition partners. Paul’s admonition that the nation take pains to avoid getting sucked into quagmires resembles old-school Republican and former secretary of defense Robert Gates’s 2011 warning that anyone who recommends a major land war in the Middle East, Asia, or Africa needs to have his “head examined.” Meanwhile, Paul’s critique of nation-building and wars unconnected to important interests, such as the Obama administration’s intervention in Libya, hearkens back to charges that many Republicans leveled against Bill Clinton’s wars in the Balkans. Conservatives were up in arms, for instance, against Madeleine Albright’s suggestion that wars for humanitarian purposes are morally superior to those connected merely to parochial American interests. And of course then-candidate George W. Bush spoke eloquently against ambitious nation-building in the run-up to the 2000 election. Paul’s argument that the country should look to “cultivate allies and encouragers among civilized Muslim nations” is not so far from Nixon’s effort to urge Asian and Middle Eastern allies to assume greater shares of the work of containment, or from Eisenhower’s view that Europeans should eventually defend themselves without relying too much on American power.
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