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To crystallize how different Paul is from all others, consider his approach to foreign aid. Paul would eliminate it altogether, starting with aid to what he deems “haters of America” — countries such as Pakistan, whose leaders are happy to receive U.S. dollars while looking the other way when its citizens burn the American flag.

All other Republican candidates, as does Obama, see foreign aid as a tool to promote U.S. interests abroad, either by dangling it as a bribe to win support or by threatening to cut it off to keep countries in line. Paul is alone in wanting to eliminate this carrot and stick approach to diplomacy in favour of relationships based overwhelmingly on capitalism and free trade. Call this naïve, call it Pollyanna-ish — plausible cases could be made here. There’s no case to be made to call it Obama-like.

Obama has used military force in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia and Libya. When most Republican candidates criticize him, it is for using force ineptly, or not at all. Paul stands apart in opposing the very wisdom of most Obama interventions.

The upshot of Paul’s approach to diplomacy is to let the locals in faraway parts of the world settle their own disputes, without the U.S. attempting to stage-manage outcomes. Where Obama and almost everyone else along the State Department diplomacy spectrum hold national borders to be sacrosanct, fearing the potential for chaos that could come of separatist tendencies among ethnic groups, Paul would let ethnic parties sort out their own borders and have the chips fall where they may. His rule is to avoid the perils of war over side shows — the disastrous overthrow of Libya’s Gaddafi demonstrates this wisdom in spades — and wage war only when necessary to protect America’s central interests, and then only when America can unambiguously win.