This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, July 15, 2014. I'm Caleb Brown. Rick Perry and other Republicans are taking aim at Rand Paul for his something less

than interventionist foreign policy.

Justin Logan, Director of Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute evaluates the debate.

Well, there's a certain amount of abstractness and lack of specifics that's normally the case in politics but is particularly of course it isn't just

the case in politics but is particularly the case in this instance.

So a lot of what's going on and of course it isn't just

Rick Perry who's attacked Rand Paul, Chris Christie's attacked Rand Paul.

Chris Christie has attacked Rand Paul.

Obviously, the entire Cheney family

has been perpetually attacking Rand Paul

at a very high level of abstraction and for the most part without many specifics

he's been called an isolationist unrealistic etc etc so part of what's going on here is that a significant portion of the GOP, what's been called the

GOP donor class, big money guys that can give money to, and they're mostly guys, to the GOP like really

hawkish foreign policy, both globally and particularly in the Middle East where Paul has made some modest noises

about being perhaps less interventionist than Dick Cheney. So part of it is

these candidates trying to appeal to those donors to get interest from those

donors early on in this pre-campaign campaign. The interesting thing about what's happening is that

Paul, by pretty much everybody's estimation,

is closer to where the public is on foreign policy.

And there's a dilemma in the sense that foreign policy rarely

is salient to the public it rarely does even a presidential election rise or

fall on the basis of foreign policy so it's a little bit of an irrelevance to talk about

...