Will Marshall is the president of the Progressive Policy Institute.

If the Crimea crisis has revealed flaws in President Barack Obama’s passive “realism,” it has also exposed the utter incoherence of Rand Paul’s foreign policy—which, despite a reputation for being principled and bold, is in fact all over the place.

If that sounds too harsh, try making sense of the Kentucky senator’s contorted response to Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. Paul, the latest favorite for the GOP’s 2016 presidential candidate, came out blasting in a recent Time op-ed, declaring that Russian President Vladimir Putin “must be punished” for violating Ukraine’s sovereignty and asserting that Obama isn’t up to the job. “If I were president, I wouldn’t let Vladimir Putin get away with it,” Paul huffed.


Such gasconade seemed out of character for the anti-war libertarian. He opposes U.S. intervention just about everywhere—whether in Syria, which he sees as an invitation to another Iraq-style quagmire, or Iran, where he rejects preemptive U.S. strikes in favor of diplomacy or, failing that, a containment policy. Sure enough, the day after his Time article appeared, Paul was back to his usual dovish tone. In a Brietbart op-ed, he prescribed the “strategic use of soft power” to counter Putin and accused unnamed politicians—clearly his GOP presidential rivals—of beating their chests: “What we don’t need right now is politicians who have never seen war talking tough for the sake of their political careers.” Those who invoke Ronald Reagan to justify their bellicosity, he added, should remember that some similarly overzealous hawks called the Gipper an appeaser for negotiating nuclear arms accords with Soviet leaders.

Confused?

Let’s step back to January 2011, when the ophthalmologist-turned-politician Paul rode the high tide of Tea Party insurgency into the U.S. Senate. Despite having zero international experience, he was nothing if not clear and consistent on foreign policy. Like his father and libertarian icon, the now-retired Texas congressman Ron Paul, Rand called for America to mind its own business instead of trying to solve other countries’ problems. He regularly excoriated GOP neoconservatives for having pushed the nation into protracted and costly wars during the Bush administration, and made no secret of his desire to get America out of the superpower business.

Paul traced what he regards as America’s biggest problems—massive debts at home and chronic overreaching abroad—to the same source: unchecked government power. To encourage Washington to resist imperial temptations and exercise more restraint in foreign affairs, he introduced legislation soon after being sworn in to cut defense spending and reduce U.S. bases and troops stationed overseas. “When we’re short of money, when we can’t do the things we need to do in our country, we certainly shouldn’t be shipping the money overseas,” Paul told CNN in a January 2011 interview, in which the neophyte lawmaker also called for cutting all foreign aid, including to Israel. Needless to say, Paul’s bid to scale back U.S. global leadership did not impress his fellow Republicans, and died a quick death in the Senate.

But that didn’t stop him. In the spring of 2011, Paul opposed Obama’s decision to help enforce a “no-fly” zone in Libya. Paul saw no national interest at stake in the popular uprising against dictator Moammar Qadhafi and accused the administration of usurping Congress’s constitutional power to authorize the use of force. Paul’s punctilious adherence to the principle of non-interference—strenuously defended in the U.N. Security Council by autocratic powers like China and, ironically, Russia, at least until Putin muscled his way into Ukraine’s affairs—has led many observers to dub Paul a neo-isolationist. This he emphatically denies, but there’s no question he wants to rein in what he sees as Washington’s manic activism abroad. As he explained to the Heritage Foundation in February of last year, such restraint is “the true conservative foreign policy, as it includes two basic tenets of true conservatism: respect for the constitution and fiscal discipline.”

About a month after making those remarks came Paul’s breakout moment, when he staged a 13-hour filibuster on the Senate floor to protest John Brennan’s nomination as CIA director and the Obama administration’s use of drones, including against Americans. For the soft-spoken former doctor, it was a passionate performance:

“I will speak as long as it takes, until the alarm is sounded from coast to coast that our Constitution is important, that your rights to trial by jury are precious, that no American should be killed by a drone on American soil without first being charged with a crime, without first being found to be guilty by a court. That Americans could be killed in a café in San Francisco or in a restaurant in Houston or at their home in Bowling Green, Kentucky, is an abomination.”

Paul’s vision of drone attacks on U.S. soil had a distinctly paranoid cast, prompting Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to call Paul and his Tea Party allies “ wacko birds.” (Plus, from the perspective of a self-avowed realist and fiscal conservative, isn’t it less risky and cheaper for the United States to rely on drones to fight our terrorist enemies, rather than the massive ground invasions Paul abhors?) Nonetheless, Paul’s central point—that the United States must be bound by law when it acts abroad no less than at home—struck a chord on the left as well as the right, earning praise for Paul’s steadfast, if quixotic, defense of the Constitution, without regard to party or politics. Here was a Republican senator attacking the president’s foreign policy from the left.

Recently, however, as his presidential star has risen—Paul won the CPAC straw poll handily earlier this month, and he is leading most of his rivals in Iowa—he appears to be trimming his sails with an eye to the 2016 nomination. Despite his antipathy to foreign aid, which he likens to “ welfare,” Paul has warmed noticeably to Israel, a position popular with social conservatives. (“When I look at it and say, ‘Well, who would I cut [foreign aid from] first?’ Well, maybe the people who are burning our flag, maybe the people who are chanting, ‘Death to America,’” he said last year. “And one of the comments I made in Israel was, ‘I don’t see anybody here, nor do I imagine an Israeli burning an American flag.’”) Now, faced with the need to say something suitably “presidential” about the renewed threat of Russian expansionism, he appears to be trying to square his anti-interventionist doctrine with his party’s tradition of muscular and unapologetic nationalism. In this, he has not succeeded.

Consider Paul’s ideas for punishing Russia, which are so inconsistent they sometimes cancel each other out: Paul the geopolitical hardliner calls for restarting work on American missile defense systems in Eastern Europe that were suspended as part of Obama’s unsuccessful “reset” of U.S.-Russian relations. But Paul the skinflint insists that “the Europeans pay for it”—which means the missile shields probably won’t go up. In one breath, Paul calls for more vigorous U.S. action to punish Russia for its rogue behavior; in the next he bemoans the fact that America is “broke” and can’t be the world’s ATM or policeman. This puzzling logic sometimes sound like a Zen koan: “Like Dwight Eisenhower, I believe the U.S. can actually be stronger by doing less,” he wrote in Time.

While insisting that he stands with Ukraine against Moscow’s attempts to dismember the country, Paul also ruled out U.S. economic aid to Ukraine because it might go to Russia to pay Kyiv’s enormous gas bills. In Paul’s view, energy isn’t just a cudgel Putin uses to intimidate neighboring countries—it’s also the main weapon America has to wean Europeans from dependence on Russian gas and oil. In contrast to Obama’s supposed dithering on energy, Paul calls for aggressively exporting U.S. natural gas to Europe and demands, weirdly, “immediate construction of the Keystone Pipeline.”

Take that, Vladimir!

The senator surely must know that America’s shale bonanza isn’t going to be a game-changer in Putin’s calculations anytime soon. The first liquid natural gas (LNG) export terminal in the United States won’t be operational until late 2015 at the earliest, and Ukraine doesn’t even have a terminal to receive it. And whatever the fate of Keystone, U.S. crude oil exports are still banned by law. Meanwhile, Europe relies on Moscow for about a third of its oil and gas (a major reason why Germany and other European Union countries aren’t rushing to impose crippling economic sanctions on Russia).

Paul’s mishmash of contradictory ideas for dealing with the Crimea crisis doesn’t bode well for his presidential prospects. It reflects his failure to fuse libertarians’ minimalist conception of the state’s role with “peace through strength” conservatism. More fundamentally, it shows what happens when the messy realities of foreign conflicts collide with the adamantine certitudes of libertarian dogma. In a telling comment that conveys Paul’s inordinate faith in diplomacy to resolve conflicts, he said the following in a January speech to the arch realists of the Center for the National Interest:

“In the end, to me diplomacy is similar to a market transaction. Market transactions are never equal. I may give you $2 for a loaf of bread, but only because I value the loaf of bread more than the $2 and you value the $2 more than the loaf of bread. So exchange occurs when each party believes that they have gotten the better of the bargain.”

The problem is, Putin is not interested in haggling over the price of bread. Neither are Iran’s mullahs or North Korea’s ruling dynasty. There seems to be little room in Paul’s one-dimensional philosophy for the irrational elements in human behavior; for militant ideologies that seek to impose non-negotiable truths; for irreconcilable national and ethnic claims to land or resources; or for the plain old evil that lurks in some tyrants’ hearts. This blindness to the real wellsprings of aggression, oppression, mass murder and terrorism in the world is something libertarians share with so-called realists.

In any event, Paul’s visceral aversion to military force, NSA surveillance and remote drone warfare seems to resonant more powerfully with anti-war liberals than with the GOP base. What other Republican senator would dare travel to the lefty citadel of Berkeley, Calif., as Paul just did, to stoke fears of the “ dystopian nightmares” that could be inflicted on America by an intelligence community “drunk with power”? The extremes touch, as the French say, and that philosophical affinity has lots of Republican strategists worried. It has also triggered a feud between Paul and another Tea Party favorite and potential 2016 contender, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), whose zeal to eviscerate the federal government apparently stops at the water’s edge. Cruz, who agrees with Paul on staying out of Syria but sides with McCain’s more aggressive stance on Iran, said on ABC earlier this month that the United States must play a “vital role” abroad, where we have a “responsibility to defend our values.”

As Paul struggles to synthesize neo-isolationism and Scowcroftian realpolitik, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has moved deftly to identify himself with Reagan’s expansive and optimistic view of America as a liberating force in world politics. Rubio has been traveling extensively abroad to burnish his internationalist credentials, and in a series of well-regarded recent speeches has endorsed both the strategic necessity of strong U.S. global leadership and America’s moral commitment to defending liberty and human rights. A Rubio-Paul showdown for the GOP nomination would force Republicans to choose between the party’s post-1945 policy of international engagement and a recrudescence of its discredited “America First” past.

Politically speaking, Paul faces an intractable dilemma: If he embraces his inner libertarian, he’ll stir excitement among liberty-loving younger Republicans—GOP strategist Bill Kristol cuttingly calls them “Snowden Republicans”—as well as many on the left who take a dim view of U.S. power and motives. But he will alienate many social conservatives and Tea Party “patriots” who still believe in American exceptionalism, as well as mainstream Republicans who see military strength as a more reliable basis for U.S. security than withdrawing from a fractious world.

So maybe Paul has no choice but to keep trying to reconcile incompatible conceptions of America’s role in the world. So far, he’s produced only a muddle.