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Washington Has Rand Paul morphed into a hawk?

Thats the question now that the junior GOP senator from Kentucky, long known for anti-interventionist views, has blasted the Obama administration for inaction in the wake of atrocities carried out by the brutal Islamic State.

Over the weekend, Senator Paul said in a speech that if he was president hed have asked for congressional authorization to destroy ISIS militarily. (The IS is sometimes referred to as ISIS or ISIL.) He repeated this assertion on Thursday in an op-ed on the subject for Time Magazine.

If I had been in President Obamas shoes, I would have acted more decisively and strongly against ISIS, writes Paul.

If nothing else, this proves Paul is pretty much certain to run for president in 2016. His relatively dovish foreign-policy views have long been seen as perhaps his biggest handicap in Republican primaries. Some pundits have gone so far as to leave him off their lists of serious contenders because they judge his anti-interventionist philosophy to be too far out of the mainstream of his partys thinking.

Now Paul seems to be using the IS crisis as a means to rebrand himself as not entirely his father Ron Pauls son. When he ran for the White House Rep. Ron Paul railed against what he saw as the waste of US resources on foreign adventurism.

Rand is distancing himself from dads isolationistic words.

Ive said since I began public life that I am not an isolationist, nor am I an interventionist, writes Paul in Time.

So what is he? According to his recent statements, hes a Ronald Reagan-like peace-through-strength conservative, who sees war as a last resort but knows sometimes the US has to fight if vital interests are threatened.

Paul isnt a neo-conservative of the type who directed much of the nations foreign policy during the George W. Bush administration, according to a key adviser.

Original post:
Have Islamic State atrocities turned Rand Paul into a hawk?