This is a Kato special podcast. I'm Caleb Brown.

Last night's GOP debate on foreign policy presented a pretty clear divergence between the foreign policy thoughts of Ron Paul

and pretty much everyone else.

That according to Chris Premble, Vice President for Defense and Foreign Policy Studies at the

Cato Institute.

I think this debate did provide a pretty clear opportunity for Ron Paul to stake out his position and for the other candidates to

stake out why they are not Ron Paul and they and and several of them I think

especially Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich and to a certain extent Perry took it as an opportunity

to do that, which is to say, to say, I'm not Ronan, here's why, and they use the example of the Patriot Act,

and they use the example of the war in Afghanistan, and they use the example of potential

war with Iran. But where I think it got interesting is in the nuance of how

they talk about the war of Iran.

So it was interesting that none of them were advocating openly war with Iran, and in fact, many of them

were really trying to differentiate how they were not the extreme position that they might be painted in a

thirty-second campaign commercial which uses five seconds of clip from a Republican debate in which they are trying to draw a distinction

between themselves and Ron Paul, but a lot of that context would get lost in such a debate.

I think they were rather disciplined in that respect.

The question then becomes is is this nuanced position

which is putting pressure on the Iranians all the way from harder sanctions, more

extensive sanctions to Newt Gingrich's proposal for drilling oil in the United States

to supposedly replace the amount of oil that Iran contributes to the global market, to covert operations to undermine the Iranian regime, to supporting

an Israeli strike.

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