Paul calls for ‘foreign policy realism’

JOHNSTON - Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul is calling for a 'foreign policy realism” that understands and acknowledges it is neither productive nor likely 'to say that we are going to recreate the world in our image.”

Paul warned that both Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, whom he sees becoming the GOP 'establishment candidate,” share a worldview that will lead to more intervention with more U.S. troops in more conflicts.

Clinton, Rubio and others whom he referred to as 'new-cons,” or neoconservatives who favor interventionism, 'think we are going to knock down bad people, regimes, get rid of them, and in their place somehow miraculously Jeffersonian democracy is going to spring up,” Paul said during taping Friday of Iowa Public Broadcasting's 'Iowa Press.” The show will be broadcast the weekend of Dec. 11.

'That's very naive, it's very dangerous, it's very expensive and it also leads to a great deal of death and carnage,” Paul said, warning that either Clinton or Rubio will take the country back to war in the Middle East.

Clinton and Rubio are two peas in a pod on foreign policy, Paul said earlier Friday on 'Mickelson in the Morning” on WHO Radio. They backed toppling Gaddafi in Libya in hopes he would be replaced with a pro-American democracy.

'The problem is the opposite happened … what we got was chaos, and now a third of Libya pledges allegiance to ISIS,” he said.

Rubio and Clinton call for a no-fly zone in Syria, which Paul called reckless because 'basically you're saying that we're going to start shooting down Russian jets. I think that's a recipe for World War III.”

At the same time, Paul denied he's an isolationist whose foreign policy calls for the United States to be 'nowhere any of the time.” The other foreign policy extreme is that we're 'everywhere all of the time, that there is never a civil war that America doesn't have to have boots on the ground.”

'I think we're very close to the ‘everywhere all of the time,' ” he said, explaining that he prefers a foreign policy that calls for the country to be 'somewhere some of the time” and not go to war without the congressional authorization called for in the Constitution.

Some have criticized that approach, calling it messy and warning that Congress might not agree to authorize military action.

'Well then, maybe we would be at war less,” he said, adding that Congress has a good track record of authorizing war when the U.S. has been attacked.