The Rand Paul-Liz Cheney foreign policy feud is the latest battle in a decades-old GOP civil war – Washington Examiner

Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming continued their verbal war on Sunday over the direction of Republican foreign policy. Dont expect this ongoing debate between the libertarian senator and the hawkish congresswoman to end anytime soon because they didnt start it.

Back when George W. Bush ran for president in 2000, he believed the United States should be humble on the world stage, warned against nation-building, and even said, Im not so sure its the role of the United States to go around saying this is the way its gotta be.

Yes, this is the same George W. Bush who later launched the Iraq War.

But in 2000, after almost eight years of President Bill Clinton and his adventures in Somalia and Yugoslavia, many Republicans had soured on U.S. intervention abroad. Four years earlier, Pat Buchanan had enthralled the conservative base in the 1996 GOP primaries running explicitly as an anti-war Republican. Buchanan even won the New Hampshire primary, before frenzied GOP elites worked overtime to secure the nomination for Bob Dole. Still, given the climate of his party, Bush had good reason at the time to make himself out as the anti-war candidate.

It wasnt to last, unfortunately.

A year after his election, President Bush would kickoff Americas longest war in Afghanistan, followed by arguably the worst mistake in U.S. foreign policy history: the invasion of Iraq. The tragedy of 9/11 gave the hawks that lined Bushs cabinet a justified reason for routing the Taliban in Afghanistan, but playing on Americans fear, they also dishonestly finagled the country into Iraq, a long-time goal of the neoconservative movement.

Bush might have been president, but the premiere hawk of that era was Vice President Dick Cheney. Support for his War on Terror defined the Republican Party for most of the Bush era. During that time, the national debt more than doubled and the federal government exploded. But nobody cared it was all about war.

So much so that the conservative establishment tried to push the small band of anti-war libertarians and paleoconservatives such as Buchanan out of the movement. Bush speechwriter David Frum even denounced them as Unpatriotic Conservatives in the pages of National Review. Frums goal was to use war fever to establish neoconservatism as conservatism proper. Frump wrote, War is a great clarifier. It forces people to take sides.

The paleoconservatives have chosen and the rest of us must choose too, Frum declared. In a time of danger, they have turned their backs on their country. Now we turn our backs on them.

Frums message was clear: Being a conservative meant being pro-war, period. If you disagreed, hawks like Frum wanted you out of the movement. And back then, unfortunately, few Republicans disagreed with their assessment.

This rigid orthodoxy wasnt challenged in any significant way within the party until former Rep. Ron Pauls Republican primary presidential campaign caught fire in 2008. Like Buchanan before him, the libertarian-leaning Paul was a strident anti-war candidate who took on Republican hawks in no uncertain terms.

When Paul tussled with hawkish candidate Rudy Giuliani over 9/11 during a debate, it was the beginning of Giulianis campaigns implosion, and helped Paul attract fans by the thousands. Giuliani dropped out after the Florida primary and received less than 600,000 votes. Meanwhile, Paul got over one million votes, and even millions more in dollars donated.

That night, however, Paul was roundly booed and Giuliani was cheered. Possibly for his foreign policy heresy, Paul was even excluded from the next debate. As Barack Obamas popularity grew as the anti-war Democrat, the GOP doubled down on its war identity, a brand the partys selection of a perpetually hawkish presidential nominee that year, the late Sen. John McCain of Arizona, only reinforced.

When McCain lost in 2008, the Obama era was also the beginning of the Tea Party movement, where the conservative grassroots began turning its focus away from war and toward runaway spending. A 2010 poll found Tea Party members split between Ron Paul as their leader, while many others admired McCains former running mate, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, who was not uniformly hawkish.

2010 was also the same year Ron Pauls son, Rand Paul, was elected to the Senate, but not before two high-profile Republican hawks injected themselves into the Kentucky GOP primary in an attempt to stop him Dick Cheney and Rudy Giuliani. Meanwhile, Palin broke ranks and endorsed Paul.

Despite hawks efforts, Paul trounced his hawk-backed primary opponent 59% to 35%. In response, Frum lamented, How is it that the GOP has lost its antibodies against a candidate like Rand Paul? The old, Bush-Cheney pro-war GOP was beginning to stumble. In 2016, conservatives would abandon them completely, and eventually turn their full attention to Donald Trump.

Trump is as popular today with his base as Bush was in 2003, however, Trump has not only denounced the Iraq War, but once even called Bush and Cheney liars for starting the conflict. Trump has openly mocked the hawks in his midst, and has said he wants to end the war in Afghanistan.

Trumps foreign policy impulses are clearly closer to Rand Pauls, even if his policy has been a mixed bag. This bothers Cheney so much that he needled Vice President Mike Pence in March for the Trump administrations apparently insufficient hawkishness.

Its ironic, then, that the son of Ron Paul and daughter of Dick Cheney are now battling it out over foreign policy, much of it hinging on who truly stands with President Trump. Various pundits have mocked them for going out of their way to prove whos Trumpier or who loves Trump more.

But Paul and Cheney do this for a reason: It matters to Republican voters.

When David Frum sought to excommunicate anti-war conservatives from the movement 16 years ago, he did so through the narrative of standing with George W. Bush. Similarly, neoconservatives have long tried to appropriate Ronald Reagan for their own agenda because of his enduring cache with the GOP base, despite the fact that hawks in Reagans day came to loathe him for reaching out to the Soviet Union.

Frum employed this method because it works standing with the president of their own party matters to most Republicans. But now, what they stand for has changed.

Today, it is the neoconservatives and camp Cheney who are on the outs with the current commander-in-chief. A Rand Paul might not have been elected in the Bush era, and he certainly wouldnt have the clout the senator has with Trump today if we had a President Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, or any of the other hawkish candidates that ran in 2016.

The Cheneys are used to being in the drivers seat when it comes to Republican foreign policy. Pauls are accustomed to being on the outside looking in.

This has reversed, a shift that was always going to lead to conflict.

"If theres a better metaphor for the GOPs current foreign policy transformation and crossroads, its tough to do better than a Paul scion feuding with a Cheney scion, observed the Washington Posts Aaron Blake, adding, (I)ts clearly the Paul-ite, noninterventionist approach that is ascendant in the Trump administration."

The decades-old debate between anti-war conservatives and ideological hawks endures as arguably the greatest divide on the Right. Fighting over the GOPs future is Rand Paul and Liz Cheney, who both claim to stand with Trump on foreign policy.

Yet only one of them is actually in line with the president, and this time, it isnt a Cheney.

Jack Hunter (@jackhunter74) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog. He is the former political editor of Rare.us and co-authored the 2011 book The Tea Party Goes to Washington with Sen. Rand Paul.

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The Rand Paul-Liz Cheney foreign policy feud is the latest battle in a decades-old GOP civil war - Washington Examiner