Is Rand Paul a secret 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, has left some in the GOP foreign policy world perplexed…

Since entering the Senate four years ago, Paul has delivered mixed signals on foreign policy. In a January speech (PDF) delivered to the realist Center for the National Interest and presided over by his soon-to-be-advisor Burt, Paul warned about the “worldwide menace of radical jihad.” Those are words that would’ve never emerged from the lips of his father, who paints all talk of Islamism as fear-mongering and has openly sided with Russia in the crisis over Ukraine. Senator Paul also scorned “labels” and the tendency to corral politicians and thinkers into neat, ideological camps. Yet, moments after criticizing such epithets, he launched into an attack on “neoconservatives,” scoffing that, “To this crowd, everyone who doesn’t agree with them is the next Chamberlain.” Burt told me that he considers Paul a traditional, Republican realist. “One of the problems with McCain’s worldview, if I can put it that way, is that if the only tool in your tool kit is the hammer of military power, every problem, every international problem looks like a nail.”

But Paul’s recruiting establishment GOP foreign policy hands to his campaign may also be a fig leaf designed to cover what is, in reality, a confused and indeterminate worldview, if not one that is much closer to the conspiratorial one enunciated by his father. A revealing incident occurred in 2009, before Paul announced his candidacy for Senate. In a speech at Western Kentucky University, Paul alleged that former Republican Vice President Dick Cheney supported the Iraq War to turn a profit for Halliburton, the conglomerate Cheney headed in the mid-1990s. “Dick Cheney then goes to work for Halliburton. Makes hundreds of millions of dollars, their CEO. Next thing you know, he’s back in government and it’s a good idea to go into Iraq,” Paul said. It’s a point of view more associated with conspiratorial websites than the mainstream of the Republican Party.