Picking up on the ongoing foreign policy feud between Rand Paul and Rick Perry, which the Dish alluded to yesterday, Larison excoriates Perry:
Perry’s argument is the usual hawkish combination of threat inflation, fear-mongering, lazy references to “isolationism,” and stale Reagan nostalgia. He talks about a “profound” threat to the U.S. and the entire world from a jihadist group when it is no such thing, and hopes that his readers will be so alarmed by this that they won’t pay attention to how shoddy his argument is. Perry is engaging in the same behavior that the former head of MI6 recently criticized: he is helping to give groups like the Islamic State the attention they crave, and he is grossly exaggerating the danger they pose to the U.S. and its allies. The governor’s analysis relies on blurring the differences between competing jihadist groups and their goals to frighten the public into assuming that any similar group that emerges represents a major security threat to the U.S.
Paul, on the other hand, could radically change the GOP’s foreign policy thinking, or so Cillizza believes:
What Paul is proposing is that he is the Republican candidate willing (and able) to handle the party’s long-delayed reckoning with the war in Iraq.
That conflict, premised on the false idea that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, has never been fully litigated within the GOP. … The back-and-forth op-eds between Paul and Perry make clear that the debate about Iraq, the mistakes made there and what it means for Republican foreign policy going forward will be a prominent feature of the 2016 Republican primary race. And, there is reason to believe that Paul’s position on Iraq is one shared by a relatively large number of Republicans. In a June New York Times/CBS News poll, 63 percent of self-identified Republicans said that the war in Iraq was not worth it.
But Kilgore expects the “isolationist” label to sink Paul in the end:
Paul’s gotten pretty good at turning what would seem to be “isolationist” positions into emblems of truculence, viz. his makeover of a long-time proposal to cut off assistance to the Palestinian Authority into a “Stand With Israel” posture. But for eons Republicans have ultimately measured their presidential candidates’ acceptability on foreign policy and national security in terms of their willingness either to kill foreigners or spend more money, if not both. No matter how much he dresses up his old man’s non-interventionism in camo patterns and how loudly he plays martial music, so long as Rand Paul opposes every opportunity to kill foreigners while calling for lower defense spending, the “isolationist” label will be a problem for him, as the ghosts of both the Cold War and the War On Terror haunt him. I suspect opponents more skillful than Rick Perry will at some point make that plain.
Noting that both of the dueling op-eds referenced Reagan extensively, Beinart asks, “So what would a Reaganite strategy against ‘radical Islam’ look like?”:
Based on Reagan’s record, particularly in his first term, it would be expensive, indiscriminate, rhetorically aggressive, hostile to congressional oversight, and cautious about deploying U.S. troops. It would, in other words, be a mess. Reagan was lucky enough to take office after Richard Nixon had exploited the Sino-Soviet rift and stopped treating communism as a unified menace. Even so, Reagan turned nearly every third-world civil war into a showdown between East and West, dramatically escalating the brutality of these conflicts even though struggles in places like Angola and Nicaragua were ultimately irrelevant to the course of the Cold War.
In today’s Middle East, by contrast, the U.S. has not yet found its Nixon. Neither the Bush nor Obama administration has developed a strategy for exploiting the widening Sunni-Shiite divide, and hawks like Perry talk about “Islamic extremism” like pre-Nixon hawks talked about communism: as a unified threat. In this context, Reagan’s strategy of indiscriminate pressure against communism across the globe offers no guide at all. What would it mean in Iraq—the topic of Paul and Perry’s columns—where an Islamist, pro-Iranian Shiite regime is battling Sunni salafists?
The Dish 