Already facing an uphill battle to win over a hawkish conservatives in the Republican presidential primaries, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul "has embraced the disastrous, John Kerry-led negotiations with the radical Islamic Iranian regime,"
The Washington Examiner’s Philip Klein writes.
Speaking at an event sponsored by
The Wall Street Journal, Paul opposed increasing sanctions, stating that "it would be a mistake to push them away from the table."
Klein notes that one year ago, Kerry begged Congress to hold off on sanctions and give his negotiators more time to get results. A year later, Tehran "has pocketed tens of billions of dollars in sanctions relief as well as concessions on uranium enrichment, plutonium development and missile technology." The outgoing chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, New Jersey Democrat Robert Menendez, has pushed back against Obama and Kerry by calling for additional sanctions.
"Kerry is getting played like a rube, and the only ones really defending the Obama administration are its remaining sycophants," Klein writes. If Paul were to vote against sanctions in the Senate, then "he’ll have to defend, in the midst of a Republican primary, why he took a lonely stand to give bipartisan cover to a farce that has come to epitomize Obama’s failed foreign policy."
On the other hand, "it’s also possible that Paul could end up completely reversing himself on sanctions. He’s been gaining a reputation for flip flopping on foreign policy," the Examiner writer adds. "There’s still time for his Iran policy to morph from woefully misguided to utterly incoherent."
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