Does anyone know how similar Rand Paul's foreign policy views are to Ron Paul's - his father?

[Douglas Carpenter]

Rand Paul is already emerging as the flavor of the month right-wing super star and currently the most talked up contender for 2016. However, it seem hard to believe that the right-wing movement could or would so fundamentally reverse itself in regards to foreign policy. Every single serious contender for the Republican nomination in 2012 endorsed the Neocon worldview on foreign policy and had as their senior advisor's foreign policy Neocons. Furthermore, the religious right in particular whom Rand Paul has actively courted supports a virtually apocalyptic foreign policy in the Middle East. I assume Rand Paul is not taking the full blown libertarian anti-imperialism isolationism of his father. Does anyone know how far he goes in this regard. Reading his statements does not really tell me anything.

[Douglas Carpenter]

1. wow! unknown to me - Juan Cole wrote about this exact same subject a few hours ago

What Would a Rand Paul Libertarian Foreign Policy Look Like? Posted on Mar 18, 2013

By Juan Cole

When the Senate passed a resolution in September pledging never to accept an Iranian nuclear weapon, there was only one dissenting vote: Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul. “A vote for this resolution is a vote for the concept of pre-emptive war,” the libertarian-leaning Republican said.

Paul most recently made headlines with his nearly 13-hour filibuster of the confirmation of CIA Director John Brennan, an architect of the Obama administration’s drone program. He wanted assurances that the administration forswore the use of drones against U.S. citizens on American soil. His longer-term strategy to rein in the drone program is to try to have the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force resolution repealed. Paul complains that the resolution is far too expansive and has authorized U.S. involvement in “20 countries.”

There is much in Paul’s proposed foreign policy that will appeal to progressives. The American left typically also opposes war as anything other than a very last resort, and would favor withdrawal from Afghanistan and avoidance of a Syrian quagmire. Containment of Iran as a policy is obviously preferable to bombing it. Questioning of President Obama’s rather lawless drone strikes and an aspiration to finally end the Authorization for Use of Military Force are all to the good. Still, the grounds of Paul’s foreign policy should raise alarums. His expansive notion of “radical Islam” sweeps up many movements and countries that are not playing an adversarial role against the United States and do not need to be contained. In some ways, Paul wants to replace the neoconservatives’ war on terror with a containment of terror, yet he shares many of their mistaken premises about the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims. Sometimes his dismissiveness toward other countries, as with his reduction of Libya to 100 tribes, is almost racist.

Despite his disavowal of isolationism, Paul’s policy prescriptions would often have that exact effect. Would it be better to give aid to revolutionary Egypt in hopes of thereby remaining in a position to influence Morsi’s directives, or to cut it off because the country’s electorate dared to vote for a Muslim fundamentalist? There is also a danger that Paul’s instinct to disengage without delay could have the opposite effect of the one he is seeking. He acknowledges that after getting abruptly out of Afghanistan, the U.S. might have to go back in with aerial bombardment if the Taliban regroup. Wouldn’t it be ironic if a President Rand Paul one day had to initiate drone strikes on Kandahar and Khost? Moreover, some of the grounds of his reluctance to engage with the Middle East also have a whiff of prejudice and Islamophobia

http://www.truthdig.com/report/page2/what_would_a_rand_paul_libertarian_foreign_policy_look_like_20130318/

[winter is coming]

2. Meh. They're both self-serving whack jobs, which is all I really need to know. n/t