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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/09/is-rand-paul-a-secret-hawk-or-maybe-not-a-total-dove.html Is Rand Paul a Secret Hawk? Or Maybe Not a Total Dove? The Republicans’ most visible isolationist is now being advised by a life-long interventionist. What gives? Kentucky Senator Rand Paul is the Republican party’s most visible dove and skeptic of foreign intervention. So it raised more than a few eyebrows when he added to his nascent presidential campaign a long-time foreign policy hand who has spent years intervening in other countries’ affairs and is associated with the Senate’s best-known hawk. Lorne Craner, a former John McCain staffer, Bush administration official, and democracy promotion advocate, recently joined the ranks of the Kentucky Republican’s potential 2016 campaign. The move, first reported last month in The Washington Post<http://mailchimp.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=64b898a0a81dd7326f504aa05&id=33872ac268&e=95fdfeaa2b>, has left some in the GOP foreign policy world perplexed. No Republican presidential candidate in recent memory has won the nomination on a dovish or non-interventionist platform. But eight years of war under the Bush administration left Americans war-weary, and may conceivably open up space for a Republican candidate arguing for a foreign policy of restraint. Indeed, a potential Hillary Clinton v. Rand Paul race could see many neoconservatives back the Democratic candidate. Is a former McCain staffer’s defection to the Paul camp a sign that the hawkish Republican foreign policy establishment is co-opting the non-interventionist – some would say isolationist – Rand? Or is Rand co-opting them by merely using his newfound adviser as a fig leaf? “Very odd,” is how one board member of the International Republican Institute, which Craner headed until last year, describes the move. IRI is the Republican offshoot of the National Endowment for Democracy, founded by Congress over 30 years ago to promote democracy and good governance overseas. It has long been a target of ire for the isolationist wing of the GOP – like Rand Paul’s father, former congressman and perennial presidential candidate, Ron -- which sees it as a meddlesome, money-wasting plaything of the party’s foreign policy hawks. McCain has been IRI’s chairman for over 20 years. “Lorne’s whole career at IRI and at State was about having a vigorous human rights policy and about American foreign policy activism,” a former senior foreign policy official in the Bush administration told The Daily Beast. “So how does he end up with the leader of American isolationism?” To hear Craner, whose position with Paul is “informal and unpaid,” explain it, the Senator has been unfairly tagged with the isolationist label, and his reaching out to internationalist Republicans like himself is a sign of open-mindedness. “I think he’s an important new voice in the foreign policy debate and I think he’s an important voice in the debate within the party on foreign policy,” Craner, served as Assistant Secretary of State<http://mailchimp.us2.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=64b898a0a81dd7326f504aa05&id=d3c91fbac4&e=95fdfeaa2b> for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, told The Beast. “He’s not an isolationist. He accurately describes himself as a non-interventionist; he has a very high standard for when we should intervene in a country.” A crucial area where one might expect Craner and Paul to disagree is foreign aid. Craner, after all, has spent his career promoting a robust American presence overseas; IRI receives and dispenses grants from the federal government for a host of activities ranging from political party building to election monitoring. Paul, meanwhile, has called for the gradual elimination of all foreign aid, starting with countries where burn the American flag<http://mailchimp.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=64b898a0a81dd7326f504aa05&id=326de7485d&e=95fdfeaa2b>. Asked how he squared his work on overseas democracy assistance with Paul’s worldview, Craner replied that “there is waste in foreign aid” that “U.S. strategic interests can be advanced, and the lives of people in other countries improved, by judicious use of foreign aid” and that “there's more to foreign policy than foreign aid.” Craner’s move to work with Paul is also striking considering the relationship that exists between his old mentor, McCain, and the Kentucky Senator. McCain is no fan, to say the least, of the Paul clan. Representing the dovish and hawkish wings of the GOP, respectively, the elder Paul and McCain clashed frequently during the 2008 Republican presidential primary. So testy was their relationship that Paul ultimately endorsed three fringe candidates<http://mailchimp.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=64b898a0a81dd7326f504aa05&id=71928757ec&e=95fdfeaa2b> over McCain, the eventual Republican nominee. Last year, when Rand spent 13 hours filibustering the nomination of CIA Director John Brennan over the Obama administration’s drone policy, McCain included him<http://mailchimp.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=64b898a0a81dd7326f504aa05&id=8aabb53fc7&e=95fdfeaa2b> in a group of obstructionist legislators he derided as “wacko birds.” Asked whom he would support in a hypothetical Hillary Clinton v. Rand Paul presidential match-up, McCain replied<http://mailchimp.us2.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=64b898a0a81dd7326f504aa05&id=e0712fcf4c&e=95fdfeaa2b>, “It’s going to be a tough choice.” And while McCain has been the most forceful advocate for American intervention in Syria, Paul couldn’t be more skeptical of such a move. Last August, Paul speculated<http://mailchimp.us2.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=64b898a0a81dd7326f504aa05&id=81b646967b&e=95fdfeaa2b> that a chemical weapons attack in Syria may have in fact been the work of the Syrian opposition, and not the government of Bashar al-Assad, as Washington and its allies alleged. Paul, an outspoken opponent of American intervention in Syria, raised the possibility that the rebels had perpetrated an attack on their own people in order to drag Washington into the conflict. “All of this redounds back to this is to the benefit of the rebels because now it’s bringing other people in on their side.” But in an interview with The Daily Beast, McCain wished the best for his former staffer, whose father spent time with McCain as a prisoner in the Hanoi Hilton, while also taking something of a backhanded swipe at Paul. “I’m glad that he’s there. It’s obvious that Lorne has a long record of involvement and advocacy for human rights and I think he will have a beneficial influence on Senator Paul on that issue.” In McCain’s telling, Craner will moderate Paul, moving him away from some of his more populist, yet unwise, foreign policy positions, and thus help close the gap that has been growing between the Republican party’s interventionist and isolationist wings. Craner got to know Paul back in 2012, when the Egyptian government arrested several IRI employees – including, most prominently, Sam LaHood, son of former transportation secretary Ray LaHood – as part of a broader assault on foreign-funded non-governmental organizations. Paul, eager to tap into an angry current pulsing through the American body politic and find an example of foreign aid gone awry, forced a floor vote in the Senate that would have cut off<http://mailchimp.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=64b898a0a81dd7326f504aa05&id=e7a7fdf1be&e=95fdfeaa2b> the $1.3 billion aid package that the US annually gives to Egypt unless it released the workers. Though Paul’s proposal didn’t go anywhere, his position allowed him to play bad cop to the administration’s good cop vis a vis the Egyptian government. “I think that in retrospect, that provided impetus for some people to move more quickly than they might otherwise have done in the administration,” Craner said. Paul again attempted to cut off aid to Egypt the following year, and like his morerecent effort<http://mailchimp.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=64b898a0a81dd7326f504aa05&id=6cc307fd54&e=95fdfeaa2b> to strip U.S. aid to the Palestinian Authority unless it explicitly recognizes Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, establishment Republicans distanced themselves from what they portrayed as a short-sighted, populist-friendly proposal. “Terrible public policy,” is how Senator Bob Corker, the ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations committee, termed<http://mailchimp.us2.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=64b898a0a81dd7326f504aa05&id=d2d32ce6f1&e=95fdfeaa2b> Paul’s Egypt aid bill. It’s all part of a larger effort by Paul to maintain Ron’s fiercely loyal and active libertarian support base while simultaneously appealing to a broader section of the public and GOP elites. Associating himself with establishment Republicans like Craner and Richard Burt, a former Reagan Defense Department official also named in the Post piece as an advisor to Paul on foreign affairs, is one way of doing this. Working on behalf of the imprisoned IRI workers was another, and it also provided an opportunity for Rand to distinguish himself from his father in an important realm of foreign policy: demo -- -- Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups. For options & help see http://groups.google.com/group/PoliticalForum * Visit our other community at http://www.PoliticalForum.com/ * It's active and moderated. Register and vote in our polls. * Read the latest breaking news, and more. --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "PoliticalForum" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
