Rand Paul’s Bizarre Mission to Moscow

As the sanctions war between the United States and Russia escalates, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has embarked on a bizarre mission to pull U.S.-Russian relations out of the tailspin caused by Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, intervention in U.S. elections, cyberattacks on the U.S. energy infrastructure, and alleged use of nerve agents in the United Kingdom.

Paul stands beside U.S. President Donald J. Trump as a champion of dialogue between Washington and the Kremlin. On August 17, Paul called on Trump to lift sanctions imposed on members of the Russian legislature, who are widely seen as a rubber stamp of the Kremlin. He wants to invite them to hold talks with his colleagues in Congress. And this past weekend the Senator accompanied Trump to his New Jersey golf club and said he would lobby the President to allow the Russian politicians to have talks in Congress.

Importantly, Paul also undertook a trip to Russia on August 6 that may have done more harm than good for Trump. In Moscow, Paul met with senior members of the Russian Federation Council Foreign Affairs Committee, including its chairman, Konstantin Kosachev, and former Russian Ambassador to the United States Sergei Kislyak. The Senator delivered to his interlocutors a letter from Trump to Russian President Vladimir Putin, and expressed his support for a continuation of a dialogue between the United States and Russia.

Here is where Paul’s journey went off the rails. The White House was furious with the Senator going off the script and implying that he had carried a confidential message from Trump to Putin. A fuming senior U.S. administration official told me that the Senator wrote the letter himself and that he insisted that U.S. Embassy personnel not accompany him to his meetings with Russian officials. This follows a pattern established by Trump in Helsinki in July, where only a translator was present at his two-hour-long meeting with Putin.

That’s not all. Paul also invited Russian lawmakers from the Foreign Relations Committee to Washington in the name of “engagement with our adversaries,” a move that found minuscule support in Congress and the White House.

There are two problems here: first, the Senate leadership does not see it fit to host Russian members of parliament when they are pushing for more sanctions on Russia. Senator Bob Corker (R-TN), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, distanced himself from Paul’s private diplomacy. Second, Valentina Matviyenko, the chairman of the Federation Council, Speaker of the Duma Vyacheslav Volodin, Duma Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Leonid Slutsky, and Kosachev are all subjects of U.S. sanctions. Granting them a U.S. visa would be a challenge unless the President decides to lift sanctions on the individuals against the opinion of his top advisers.

Yet this does not seem to deter Paul.

“Even in the height of the Cold War, I think it was a good thing that” U.S. President John F. Kennedy “had a direct line to” Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, Paul said.

These calls for dialogue seem like a 180-degree turn by the Senator who called on then-U.S. President Barack Obama to “isolate Russia as a rogue nation” following its invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea in 2014. Paul insisted at the time that Putin be punished for his actions.

Even more curiously, Paul was once one of Trump’s most prominent Republican Party critics, particularly during the 2016 presidential election. In one Comedy Central TV interview, Paul went so far as to call then candidate Trump “a delusional narcissist and an orange-faced windbag” adding that “a speck of dirt is way more qualified to be President.”

Paul’s tone has certainly changed in recent months. He was one of just a small handful of Senators who refused to criticize Trump on his performance next to Putin in Helsinki in July, which drew ridicule from both sides of the aisle.

He was also one of only two Senators to vote against imposing new sanctions on Russia in June 2017. On his visit to Moscow, Paul told Russian lawmakers he would vote against any new sanctions proposed by his colleagues in the Senate.

So, what is behind the Senator’s seemingly inexplicable support of perhaps this President’s most widely unpopular positions on Russia? Paul and Trump share an aversion to foreign entanglements, foreign wars, and foreign aid—all common threads in the President’s “America First” tapestry. As Paul reportedly grows closer to the President, his influence in executive foreign policymaking may increase. So too will support from his traditionally libertarian base. Yet his views are as far from the Washington mainstream as Kentucky is from the Kremlin.

In a March foreign policy manifesto titled “It’s Time for a New American Foreign Policy,” Paul blasted U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, criticizing the Trump Administration for continued engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan, support of Saudi Arabia, and sanctions against Iran.

The article was a mix of deserved criticism of those who supported the Iraq War and the destruction of Muammar Qaddafi’s regime in Libya, but Paul also managed to conflate Republican neoconservatives and the Obama Administration’s Wilsonian institutional internationalists. It was either deliberate misdirection or sheer ignorance, but the net effect was to sound simplistic, naive, and misinformed.

Since then, he has apparently came around, throwing his support behind Trump’s Putinversteher policy.

Paul’s privateer mission to Moscow is not going to improve U.S.-Russian relations. Only a change of heart in the Kremlin can do that. The mission, disavowed by the White House and the Senate, hurts both Paul and the Trump presidency.

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