Thank GOP Hawks for Rand Paul

John Tate, who heads the Campaign for Liberty, a grassroots lobbying group founded by Rand Paul’s father, Ron, dismissed the party’s foreign policy establishment as nervous about new competition. “Why would they be reacting so strongly and forcefully and negatively if they weren’t scared?” he asked. But the Paul phenomenon is largely the party’s own doing, the consequence of the GOP’s hawkish wing having long ago displaced its moderate one. For decades, moderates ruled the party’s foreign policy establishment, from President Dwight Eisenhower, who was unafraid to issue nuclear threats to end the Korean War yet inveighed against the military-industrial complex, to President George H. W. Bush, who called for a “new world order” yet resisted the temptation to depose Saddam Hussein in the final days of the Persian Gulf War.