Over the weekend, Politico ran a feature penned by Elizabeth Wahl, the American journalist whose Crimea-inspired on-air resignation from RT (the Russian television network dedicated to bringing Moscow-approved propaganda to the West) went viral —and, a cynic might note, earned her a measure of notoriety she had previously lacked.

The piece doesn’t leave Wahl in the best light — which is probably a sign that she deserves praise for her candor. What emerges is a picture of a somewhat naive young woman who was slow to wrap her head around the fact that RT functions primarily as an annex of the Kremlin, and slower yet to conclude that any such institution is inherently anathema to the practice of anything like real journalism. Still, if ever the phrase “better late than never” applies, it’s probably here.

One of the more compelling sections of the story is Wahl’s description of RT’s editorial priorities, which were invariably skewed towards whatever narratives cast America in a negative light. She notes, for instance, that RT became obsessed with the Occupy movement, hoping, apparently, that the French Revolution was coming to Zuccotti Park. 

And then there’s this, about the 2012 presidential election:

In RT’s eyes, only one candidate mattered: Ron Paul. I don’t remember Paul ever speaking to RT during campaign season, but that didn’t stop our obsessive coverage of the “rock star” candidate. After a while the bosses’ fixation with him seemed bizarre. Why were they pushing non-stop coverage of this long shot? Something tells me it wasn’t his message of freedom and liberty but his non-interventionist stance and consistent criticism of U.S. foreign policy. His message fit RT’s narrative—that the United States is a huge bully.

Now, let’s stipulate that there are limitations to judging a foreign policy just by who cottons to it. One could argue, for instance, that Iran stood to benefit from the war in Iraq by having the regime that functioned as its regional counterbalance defanged (that’s eliding, of course, the fear that something similar could happen in Tehran). That doesn’t mean that George W. Bush was the ayatollah’s man in Washington.

There’s a distinction, however, between a foreign policy that occasionally generates second-order effects propitious to regimes we don’t much care for (an inherent liability of the trade) and one that grafts so cleanly onto our adversaries’ worldview that they’re happy to repackage it for their own purposes. If you’re in the halls of power in Tehran, Moscow, Damascus, Beijing, or Caracas — or for that matter, holed up in a cave somewhere with a bad attitude and a C-4 surplus — you want America looking at the world through Ron Paul’s eyes.

I don’t write any of this to demonize Congressman Paul, who is, in any event, more or less off the public stage at this point. Indeed, I think the gravitational pull his presidential campaigns exerted on the Republican Party on the domestic front — moving us towards a more libertarian sensibility — was a net positive, even if he consistently lacked any prudential sense of a limiting principle.

The reason this matters is because of his son. Many GOP foreign policy hawks have gone out of their way to tar Rand Paul early and often with his father’s ideology. In one sense, this is unfair — Paul fils has never dangled out on the same kind of rhetorical limbs as Paul pere (who, recall, went so far as to second guess the mission that killed Osama Bin Laden).

In another sense, however, it’s understandable — if not necessarily justifiable. We know that Rand Paul has a more restrictive view of the use of American power than your average Republican officeholder. But we don’t know exactly what that means.

Paul’s foreign policy pronouncements have been consistently opaque. Read his major foreign policy address to the Heritage Foundation last year. It’s somewhat reminiscent of a 2008 Barack Obama speech — it feels as if it’s covering a lot of terrain as you read it, but you’d be hard pressed to give someone a paragraph’s worth of takeaway items. (To be fair, Marco Rubio’s big foreign policy address at the American Enterprise Institute last fall was even thinner on substance). 

That leads to one of two conclusions: (1) That Senator Paul hasn’t quite worked all of this out yet or (2) that he’s intentionally playing possum to conceal the similarities between his views and his father’s. Best I can tell, that’s six-to-five and pick ’em, but the critics automatically assume the latter. I see no evidence to suggest that’s true — but I also don’t see any to disprove it.

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 One of the reasons it’d be nice to see Senator Paul get more specific is that this is a debate the GOP desperately needs. There’s a lot of space on the Republican foreign policy spectrum between Ron Paul and honorary Spartan John McCain — and yet there’s no public official prominently articulating an alternative approach. That’s something that leaves a Jacksonian like yours truly out in the cold.

Perhaps Rand Paul can fill that void. Or perhaps he really is the pale pastel version of his father’s bold colors. We’ll never know until he tells us.

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