Hey guys! I got an idea. You know bad stuff? What if we, you know, didnt do it?
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  • "Hey guys! I got an idea. You know bad stuff? What if we, you know, didn't do it?"

Yesterday, Rand Paul gave a foreign policy speech at the Center for the National Interest. His team had been hinting at something major, a grand doctrine for the future of foreign policy in the Republican Party. And for the most part, the press has responded with the same intense grandiosity that Paul's team set them up for; Zack Beauchamp at Vox, for instance, called Paul's speech "one of the most important speeches on foreign policy since George W. Bush declared war on Iraq." Beauchamp cooed that rather than invading a foreign country, "Paul declared war on his own party," announcing his intent to "run at" Republican foreign policy "with a battering ram" in 2016. So virile! So aggressive! So heroic!

So what did Paul actually propose in his speech? Well, as Beauchamp informs us, he said America should declare war only when we're attacked and after we've exhausted all other options. He said Congress "must authorize the decision to intervene." He called for "diplomacy and leadership" through trade. And he said that the economy is a defense issue. Like most of Rand Paul's more popular ideas, these are all platitudes that just about every college freshman would passionately agree with. (Diplomacy, yeah! Why didn't we, like, do diplomacy before?) This is the equivalent of Google's "don't be evil" motto, a bit of dorm-room lip service to simplicity that sounds less and less believable as situations become more and more complicated.

So what are the specific examples that Paul mentions in his speech? He was for bombing Afghanistan after 9/11, but is against Obama's escalation there. "America shouldn't fight wars where the best outcome is stalemate," Paul announced, as though any president in history ever popped a boner at the idea of a military stalemate. (And what if we get attacked by someone who would lead us into a war where the best outcome is stalemate? Fully one-quarter of Paul's foreign policy indicates that we should fight that war, and another quarter of the policy dictates that we should avoid that war.) He wants to negotiate with Iran on its nuclear program. He wants to cooperate with China. He loves the idea of bombing ISIS but is against arming Syrian rebels. Basically, in typical courageous Rand Paul style, he is for the good elements of our foreign policy and against the bad elements of our foreign policy. Paul declared that "America should and will fight wars when the consequences—intended and unintended—are worth the sacrifice." Uh, OK. But how do you predict the unintended consequences of an action? If you can envision the unintended consequences of an action before you take the action, aren't they really intended consequences? Is "don't make mistakes" really a coherent foreign policy?