Republican critics of a restrained foreign policy often resort to defining those who disagree with them as “anti-military.” The trouble with that critique is it isn’t reliably accurate. As the Washington Post recently reported, leading military strategists are presently returning to a more traditionally conservative position:

“As President Obama was weighing how to halt Islamic State advances in Iraq, some of the strongest resistance to boosting U.S. involvement came from a surprising place: a war-weary military that has grown increasingly skeptical that force can prevail in a conflict fueled by political and religious grievances.

Top military officials, who have typically argued for more combat power to overcome battlefield setbacks over the past decade, emerged in recent White House debates as consistent voices of caution in Iraq. Their shift reflects the paucity of good options and a reluctance to suffer more combat deaths in a war in which America’s political leaders are far from committed and Iraqis have shown limited will to fight.”

This swing reflects a much needed realist injection into our foreign policy debate. After a decade and a half of idealistically-driven military action under both the Bush and Obama administrations, a balance of this variety is welcome. Historically speaking, rational restraint is in fact, conservative. As Ronald Reagan explained in his autobiography, the “irrationality of Middle Eastern politics” led to his decision to withdraw troops from Lebanon and seek, as he put it, a more “neutral position” in order to save the lives of American soldiers.



Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Today, there is only one Republican presidential candidate heeding the warnings of Reagan and current military leaders. As Rand Paul has stated, “I’m not sending one American GI to take Mosul if the Iraqis are not willing to fight for it. They need to fight. There are going to need to be boots on the ground. But the boots on the ground need to be Arab boots on the ground.”

Paul acknowledges the limitations inherent to government force, and further recognizes that actions abroad can have unintended consequences. Said Paul: “Each time we topple a secular dictator, I think we wind up with chaos, and radical Islam seems to rise.” This is a reasonable position that reflects reality, especially as it pertains to power vacuums that have led to dangerous extremism in places such as Libya and Iraq in recent years.

Thus far, the rest of the Republican presidential field appears to support the interventionist aspects of the Obama-Clinton foreign policy, with declared candidates Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio as particularly enthusiastic cheerleaders. Both Senators supported “Hillary’s War” in Libya, military action in Syria, and haven’t seen a troop reduction they deem reasonable.

Today, these Republicans say that Obama is being “weak” as his policies flounder. The interesting thing about that claim is they have supported his reckless interventions, and it’s military leaders who are arguing for caution. In fact, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter shares Paul’s view that ground forces are not required in an air campaign targeted against ISIS.

It will be fascinating to see whether members of the Republican presidential field will listen to the nation’s top military leaders and exercise caution moving forward. Ultimately, it is possible to destroy enemies who pose a threat to our homeland without simultaneously creating power vacuums abroad that lead to the rise of groups such as ISIS. The bad news for ideologically driven hawks such as Graham and Rubio is that doing so requires realist analysis and restraint.

Corie Whalen Stephens is a libertarian-conservative activist and writer based in Houston, Texas

Click through the gallery below to see where Rand Paul and some of the other presidential candidates stand on the issues that Americans care about.



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Donald Trump





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Ben Carson





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Ted Cruz





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Marco Rubio





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Scott Walker





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Jeb Bush





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Rand Paul





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Mike Huckabee





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Carly Fiorina