Rand Paul suddenly finds his inner hawk

This is hardly the first time that Senator Paul’s position on key national-security issues has rapidly evolved. If his rivals can’t call him an isolationist anymore, they will call him an opportunist. “He is starting to put John Kerry to shame when it comes to flip flops,” said a Republican operative who supports one of Senator Paul’s rivals for the 2016 nomination.

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A hawkish position on the Islamic State also undercuts one of the main arguments for why Senator Paul is the Republican most capable of taking back the White House. “I think that’s what scares the Democrats the most,” Paul explained, “is that in a general election, were I to run, there’s gonna be a lot of independents and even some Democrats who say, ‘You know what, we are tired of war. We’re worried that Hillary Clinton will get us involved in another Middle Eastern war.’”

Yet Paul is now the self-appointed champion of precisely that war. Perhaps, like others accused of inconsistency, Paul will invoke John Maynard Keynes’s apocryphal observation, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” The challenge for Paul will be to demonstrate that his new opinions are the result of new facts, rather than a change in the temperature of public opinion.

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