Rand Paul on the Military

A Senator Lays Out His Positions on the Military, Very Carefully

Senator Rand Paul in Washington last week. He spoke Tuesday to cadets at the Citadel, the military college in Charleston, S.C.

CHARLESTON, S.C. — A few months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush came to the Citadel, the military college here, to lay out his plans to reconfigure the armed forces for his interventionist posture known as the Bush Doctrine.

On Tuesday, Senator Rand Paul went there, effectively to describe just how far he would go in moving the nation away from that doctrine, another step in his effort to position himself as part of the ever-earlier maneuvering of presidential politics, while establishing his place in the continuing fight over his party’s direction. As a face of the emergent strain of libertarian-leaning Republicanism, Mr. Paul has drawn suspicion from members of the party’s hawkish wing, which has held sway for decades. Some of them consider him an isolationist.

Speaking at the Citadel, on the Ashley River here, Mr. Paul declared his support for the “peace through strength” approach of President Ronald Reagan but, true to form, called for an audit of the Pentagon.

“America must be engaged in the world, commercially, diplomatically and, when necessary, militarily,” he told a crowd of several hundred cadets who sat at attention in crisp white uniforms. “But to be engaged doesn’t mean to always be engaged in war.”

“As a senator, I will, if I have to, not hesitate to vote for war,” he said but added that “an America that did not seek to become involved in every conflict of the world could do things to make us safer at home and abroad.”

In praising Mr. Reagan’s Cold War military stance, Mr. Paul harked back to an era of vast military spending. But he said that he would not give the military “a blank check” and would audit the Pentagon “not because I dislike the military, because I like the military.” He said he would convene a task force of leading military thinkers to cut waste and use the savings to modernize the forces.

Mr. Paul was speaking as a member of the Senate’s Foreign Relations and Homeland Security Committees, and he never mentioned his prospective presidential run. But allusions to it have been unavoidable throughout his trip to this early primary state. He drew applause in the packed hall when he reprised a line of attack against former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton for her handling of the terrorist assault on the United States mission in Benghazi, Libya, last year, saying that it had been a “dereliction of duty” and should “preclude Hillary Clinton from ever holding high office again.”

On Monday, at a session with reporters, Mr. Paul attacked another potential 2016 rival, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, with whom he could compete for the Republican nomination, as a big-spending moderate.

He also addressed a crowd of party leaders and activists at a regular local gathering called the Charleston Meeting, held by Mallory Factor, a prominent conservative businessman, author and fund-raiser. (After Mr. Paul’s speech, Mr. Factor, who is also a professor of international politics and American government at the Citadel, said that Mr. Paul had “wowed them more than anyone else I’ve seen here.”)

Mr. Paul’s heavy schedule of appearances in South Carolina has followed a trying period for him. First, another potential Republican rival, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, eclipsed him during the government shutdown; then he was accused of plagiarism for not attributing the work of others in speeches, an opinion article and one of his books.

Source:  New York Times, by JIM RUTENBERG
Published: November 12, 2013, nytimes.com
A version of this article appears in print on November 13, 2013, on page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: A Senator Lays Out His Positions on the Military, Very Carefully.