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Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky) has devoted much of his political career to pushing for smaller budgets and a scaled-back U.S. military.

Not anymore.

On Wednesday, Paul proposed increasing defense spending by nearly $190 billion over the next two years. The amendment was first reported by Time Magazine.

That seeming about-face comes as he gets ready to launch a presidential bid next month -- and continues to adjust foreign policy stances that have moved ever further from his libertarian roots.

His latest move may appeal to more mainstream GOP voters: According to a CNN/Opinion Research poll from last year, about 70 percent of Republicans consider themselves hawks rather than doves.

But it's less clear is how his base voters will react. According to a 2013 poll from Reason magazine, self-identified libertarians were much more supportive of defense spending cuts than the public overall or Republicans. The poll found that 60 percent of libertarians supported cutting defense as a way to balance the budget, compared to 49 percent of the overall public and 29 percent of the country as a whole.

How far is the new Paul policy from his old positions? In 2011, back in the pre-sequester era, he called for about a 23 percent reduction in defense spending, including cuts to overseas operational costs and war spending from $159 billion to about...zero.

The amendment Paul put forward Thursday would allocate $697 billion for defense in the next fiscal year. Paul adviser Doug Stafford said the amendment is "response to others in both chambers who are attempting to add to defense spending - some way more than Senator Paul's amendment - without paying for it."

Paul said last month at the Conservative Political Action Conference that national defense is a top priority, a position he has stressed on the campaign trail -- where voters have peppered him with questions about the Islamic State and Iran.

[Read:Paul tries to cement defense as top priority]

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What Rand Pauls defense spending proposal tells us about his 2016 strategy

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) -- he of the "non-interventionist" foreign policy -- wants to increase defense spending. This comes after he has, in the past, called for a significant reduction thereof.

From Time's Alex Rogers and Zeke Miller:

The move completes a stunning reversal for Paul, who in May 2011, after just five months in office, released his own budget that would have eliminated four agenciesCommerce, Housing and Urban Development, Energy and Educationwhile slashing the Pentagon, a sacred cow for many Republicans. Under Paulsoriginal proposal, defense spending would have dropped from $553 billion in the 2011 fiscal year to $542 billion in 2016. War funding would have plummeted from $159 billion to zero. He called it the draw-down and restructuring of the Department of Defense.

But under Pauls new plan, the Pentagon will see its budget authority swell by $76.5 billion to $696,776,000,000 in fiscal year 2016.

The boost would be offset by a two-year combined $212 billion cut to funding for aid to foreign governments, climate change research and crippling reductions in to the budgets of the Environmental Protection Agency, and the departments of Housing and Urban Development, Commerce and Education.

So while Paul's old proposal funded defense at $542 billion in 2016, his new one funds it at $697 billion -- a 28 percent increase.

This is significant. Paul has often stressed that his non-interventionist foreign policy isn't isolationist, but he has also clearly been on the more dovish side of the GOP, particularly when it comes to curtailing foreign aid and avoiding unnecessary wars.

The problem is, the dovish portion of the GOP is a fast-shrinking constituency in the 2016 presidential race. While it was trendy not long ago, as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have drawn down and the Islamic State has taken hold, the Republican Party has very much reverted to a more hawkish footing akin to where it was during the Bush administration. And it has happened very quickly.

To wit, this poll from September:

In less than a year, the percentage of Republicans who said the United States was doing "too little" overseas jumped from 18 percent to 46 percent. That's the kind of massive shift you rarely see in such a short period of time. And it belied what has long been true of the GOP; when there is reason to be hawkish, today's Republican Party will be hawkish.

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Rand Paul now wants more defense spending. Welcome back to the old GOP.

Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul has made a 180-degree turn on defense spending weeks before he is scheduled to launch his campaign for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.

The Kentucky Republican has offered an amendment to the Senate GOP budget that would increase total spending at the Pentagon for fiscal 2016 to $696 billion.

Paul would add $76 billion to Senate Budget Committee Chairman Mike Enzis (R-Wyo.) total for spending at the Pentagon.

Paul wants to increase defense spending over the next two years by $190 billion.

Its a reversal for Paul, who proposed significant defense spending cuts in the first budget he introduced after coming to the Senate in 2011.

Enzis budget keeps the Pentagons baseline budget at $523 billion but increases a separate account used to fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to $96 billion.

The Paul amendment doesnt specify whether his funding would be added to the baseline budget or the war account.

Republicans in the House and Senate have been worried the Pentagon will not have enough money once spending ceilings under a 2011 budget deal go back into place on Oct. 1. They have pressed for an end to the budget caps but have been opposed by fiscal conservatives. The Obama administration wants to lift the ceilings on defense and nondefense spending.

Time magazine first reported Pauls amendment to dramatically boost defense funding.

Paul would offset the cost of the funding increase by cutting foreign aid, science and technology funding, natural resources and environment funding and education, training, employment and social services funding.

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Paul seeks $76B boost for defense

As he pulls together his expected presidential campaign in Iowa and New Hampshire, Sen. Rand Paul is confronted by defections from an unexpected quarter: the die-hard idealists whose energy powered his fathers campaigns.

That network of committed supporters was expected to convey to Paul, the natural successor to Ron Pauls libertarian movement, providing him with a plug-and-play ground organization in the make-or-break early voting states. But instead of embracing the Kentucky senator, many of those grass-roots activists are turning their backs on him, disillusioned by the younger Pauls concessions to mainstream politics.

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One of the most prominent defectors is Drew Ivers, chairman of Ron Pauls 2012 Iowa campaign, who says he will not endorse Rand Paul for president. On Tuesday, three members of Iowas Ron Paul-aligned Liberty movement state Sen. Jason Shultz and former Iowa Republican Party central committee members Chad Steenhoek and Joel Kurtinitis announced the same, adding that they will support Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. Ivers said he does not plan to endorse any candidate.

Sen. Rand Paul continues to have tremendous support from the vast majority of the liberty movement, said Sergio Gor, communications director for the Paul campaign.

Shultz had endorsed Ron Paul in 2012 and Kurtinitis served as his Iowa regional director. Steenhoek worked for Newt Gingrichs Iowa campaign but was sympathetic to Ron Paul, who endorsed Steenhoeks subsequent bid to serve on the state central committee.

Ivers, who had dinner with Rand Paul in August, said the Kentucky senator has abandoned many of the stances that made Ivers loyal to his father.

Hes moderating on most of them, not taking a real clear stance on a number of them, said Ivers. The strategy of sending a blended message is one that has risk.

That was never an issue for Ron Paul, whose uncompromising ways and willingness to operate on the margins relegated him to the sidelines of national politics. Even at the height of his national influence and popularity in 2012, the Texas congressman proved unable to win the popular vote in a single state and never seriously contended for the GOP nomination in several tries.

Rand Paul, by contrast, won statewide office in his first try and has established himself as a viable presidential candidate with a talent for taking the movements liberty message to a broader audience.

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Ron Paul supporters bolt Rand camp

Way back in February 2011, newly installed Kentucky senator Rand Paul rose to deliver his first speech on the Senate floor. Calling back to the antebellum debates between pro- and anti-slavery politicians, Paul offered a discourse on the relative virtues of compromise and standing on principle in the face of a crisis, and he wondered: how should todays legislators compromise in the face of a fiscal nightmare and potentially a debt crisis?

The answer, Paul concluded, is of course there must be dialogue and compromise but compromise must occur on where we cut spending and by how much. As to what that compromise must look like, he offered a vision: The compromise must be conservatives acknowledging that we can cut military spending and liberals acknowledging that we can cut domestic spending.

Pauls calculus was simple: the governments debt was the gravest threat the country faced, and reducing it meant cutting spending everywhere, including the military budget. Most Republicans would sooner self-amputate a limb than trim defense spending, but Paul stuck by his guns, even as he campaigned for Mitt Romney in 2012. Romney chose to criticize President Obama for seeking to cut a bloated Defense Department and for not being bellicose enough in the Middle East, two assertions with which I cannot agree, Paul wrote in an October 2012 CNN Op-Ed. Defense and war spending has grown 137% since 2001. That kind of growth is not sustainable.

That brings us to yesterday, as the House of Representatives prepared to vote on competing budget proposals and the Senate was calling up amendments to the Republican budget. As reported by Time, Sen. Rand Paul stood and introduced an amendment that would add $76.5 billion to the Pentagon budget and offset those outlays with steep cuts to climate change research, the EPA, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Education Department, and the Commerce Department.

So much for the great compromise! The Senate GOP budget already imposes steep cuts on domestic spending to achieve balance. Paul now wants liberals to absorb additional cuts to domestic spending so that conservatives may indulge in a little more not sustainable defense spending.

What happened? Well, the easy answer is that Paul is running for president. Literally every other Republican candidate will be promising to engorge the defense budget past the breaking point in order to prove they are the true reincarnation of Ronald Reagan. With the Iran negotiations and the fight against the Islamic State, foreign policy is dominating the 2016 conversation right now, and Rand has probably made the calculation that he just cant continue being an outlier within the party on this issue. At the very least, he wants to have something to throw back at people like Marco Rubio who will run hard on foreign policy and demagogue the hell out of Pauls longstanding insistence that defense spending be cut. Pauls amendment, as Time notes, raises military spending by nearly the same level that Rubio proposed in his own amendment.

The true compromise thats happening here is on Rand Pauls much-vaunted libertarian principles, which hes shown an eager willingness to shed as he moves closer and closer to announcing his presidential candidacy. He debuted on the national scene as a Republican who would stand on principle to buck the Republican establishment, and since then hes steadily diluted his own positions to bring them into closer alignment with the mainstream of the party. The Rand Paul who once scoffed at the Republican hawks and interventionists has since joined their ranks in calling for a sustained military campaign to destroy the Islamic State. He used to support cutting aid to Israel, but now denies ever having espoused that position.

Reversals like these also undercut what is supposed to be the core of Rand Pauls appeal: that hes a different kind of Republican who can hold on to hardcore conservatives while simultaneously poaching traditionally Democratic voters. Rand is the Republican who has the best chance of keeping and energizing the base while going into their constituencies, a Paul aide said last August. Its kind of dangerous to have a Republican like Rand. With each flip-flop, Rand is turning himself into the thing he cant afford to be: just another Republican.

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Rand Pauls spectacular crash: How a man of principle turned into a generic politician