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Paul doesn't call himself a non-interventionist. In his recent foreign policy address, he used the phrase "conservative realism" to describe his approach to the world. But according to McCarthy, the branding is Rand's attempt to make non-interventionism palatable to the modern Republican electorate, which has a pretty hawkish worldview. "Even though he likes the non-interventionist roadmap, he's willing to deviate from it if he thinks it's realistic in policy terms, let alone political ones," McCarthy says.

In practice, that means you'll see Paul defending some pretty aggressive policies (e.g., his declaration that "I support a strategy of air strikes against ISIS") even while staying on the non-interventionist side of the Washington consensus (e.g., opposing arming the Syrian rebels and ground troops). It wasn't always that way. In the past, Paul wouldn't have needed to qualify his non-interventionist position so much. The American conservative mainstream was once far more skeptical of the use of American force abroad than it was today.

How World War I created non-interventionism

Since the American founding, and maybe even before then, there's been a deep tension in America's impulses on foreign policy. On the one hand, Americans were deeply skeptical of getting involved in European power politics. On the other hand, American policy towards its neighbors — particularly American Indians and Latin American nations — was aggressively, violently imperialist. There's never been a truly isolationist America, or even a particularly peaceful one.

That said, concern about getting involved outside of the Americas — see George Washington's famous criticism of "permanent alliances" in his Farewell Address — has had a real impact on American foreign policy. The sentiment behind it began to develop into a coherent ideology in the 1890s, when the US launched the Spanish-American war and started looking more like a global imperial power.

As McCarthy tells it, the movement that would one day birth Rand Paul is the child of two different parents: World War I and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Each plays a critically important, but different, role in creating a uniquely conservative critique of American empire.

The Great War's pointless slaughter, according to McCarthy, galvanized American critics of foreign entanglement. "After World War I," he says, there are many "former progressives, people who were on their way to becoming the forerunners of modern libertarianism, who are now strongly, strongly anti-war." The American public was deeply sympathetic to their cause. Though the idea that America became "isolationist" after World War I is largely ahistorical, public opposition to foreign wars sharply limited both Woodrow Wilson's and FDR's ability to get the US involved in the world wars.

The skepticism was, to a degree, cross-ideological: neither the American left nor the right liked what they saw in 1918. It took FDR for conservative non-interventionism to become a unique ideology.

The right goes to war

The anti-FDR backlash is the key historical development for understanding Rand Paul." In the 1930s, the right becomes defined by being opposed to the New Deal," McCarthy says. "A lot of these guys who came out of the progressive tradition and had been individualist people of the left, because they really don't like the New Deal, wind up gravitating towards some of the commercial interests that are opposed to the New Deal." The opposition to foreign wars and the expansion of the US government becomes linked.

The backbone of Paul's worldview is that foreign policy is just like any other big government project: wasteful, opposed to freedom, and, by and large, counterproductive. While George W. Bush-style neoconservatives believe that a heavy dose of American might can improve the world, Paul's conservatism worries about America acting as a global welfare state.

This version of conservatism has been out of vogue since World War II. Its last major elected proponent was Sen. Robert A. Taft, the son of President William Taft, who died in 1953.

The reason conservative non-interventionism collapsed in the 1940s is pretty simple: it was utterly, spectacularly wrong about World War II. Right up until Pearl Harbor, the movement was "still thinking in terms of the war they've seen before, as opposed to the new questions involved in World War II," McCarthy says.

Then the Cold War began, and non-interventionism gave way to anti-Communism. As articulated in the late '40s, this conservatism felt "kind of archaic, out of date" McCarthy says. "It doesn't have a lot of cache, and the people who expound it are pretty old — they're in their '60s or their '70s." Cold Warriors, like National Review's William F. Buckley, carry the day.

The Cold War Right and Rand Paul

The Cold War turned conservative non-interventionism into what McCarthy calls a "sub-culture;" or, more accurately, sub-cultures. As mainstream conservatism became more hawkish, a variety of non-interventionisms flourished on the margins. Each of these had, in McCarthy's estimation, a degree of influence on Rand Paul's worldview.

First, a group of libertarians centered on Murray Rothbard, a leading light of American libertarianism during the 20th century, developed an absolutist critique of American interventionism: the United States, according to Rothbard, needed to end the Cold War and withdraw almost entirely from military involvement in the world. The most influential elected avatar of the Rothbardian position is Rand's father, former Congressman Ron Paul. "Rand is also aware of where his father's coming from," McCarthy says, and has "sort of absorbed it indirectly from his father."

That said, Rand is very much not his father. "Things like NATO exist," McCarthy says, and "the Rothbardian position is we can just abolish all of this." That's impossible, and it's not clear Rand even wants to go that far. Instead, Rand's position is much more moderate — something he shares in common with post-world War II conservatives like Robert Nisbet and Russell Kirk. These conservatives saw non-interventionism as sort of a guiding principle; the United States should minimize its involvement in world affairs as much as possible, but some problems — in their case, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union — required a vigorous American response. Paul's support for military measures against terrorist groups like ISIS shows that he shares that pragmatism, in stark contrast to his Rothbardian father.

There's also a darker element of the American non-interventionist right. McCarthy delicately calls this a "populist" strain, which is true, but it's also paranoid and xenophobic. From Joseph McCarthy's witch hunt to the John Birch Society's outright racism, this group is suspicious of so-called foreigners and wants America to avoid being contaminated by them. There's zero reason to believe Rand Paul shares any of this group's truly toxic beliefs, but what McCarthy calls "the kind of populist right that dislikes the idea that we're involved with foreign cultures" has undeniably been a major part of the anti-war right.

Paul's worldview, though, is more modern than all that. He owes a lot to the so-called paleoconservatives of the 1990s, who believed America's mission in the world collapsed with the Berlin Wall. These paleocons were temporarily marginalized after 9/11, but the Iraq War revived non-interventionism with a vengeance. Paleocons and libertarians were joined by more establishmentarian realists, people who support America acting globally to advance its interests but were appalled by Bush's counter-productive and deadly use of force.

Paul's foreign policy reflects all of these beliefs, both out of genuine influence and political necessity. He needs to build a non-interventionism that can unify these groups and challenge Bush-era neoconservatism for control over the Republican Party. "Every indication I see from his speeches is that he's someone who wants to think through this step-by-step," McCarthy says.

Remaking a political party is a monumental task. But Paul has about a century of conservative foreign policy thinking at his back.