Edward Luce offers an optimistic asssessment of the chances for Republican foreign policy reform:

The more accurate answer is that Republican realism is not dead. It is sleeping. And it is showing signs of stirring. This is why Mr Paul – a “non-interventionist” – attracts so much fire from his rivals.

There are a few encouraging signs that many rank-and-file Republicans want no part of the party’s “instinctive militarism,” as Luce calls it. There is clearly no appetite for U.S. entry into any ongoing conflicts, and there appears to be very little patience with incessant demands that the U.S. take “action” in response to virtually every crisis that makes the news. It’s also true that Sen. Paul would be encountering much less hostility from Republican politicians and former officials if they thought his arguments had no broader appeal. Even so, if Republican realism is merely “sleeping,” it must be enjoying a very deep slumber. After a disastrous war that discredited the party’s hard-liners and three sound electoral drubbings in which hawkish foreign policy was a clear liability, one might expect Republican realism to be doing a lot more than “stirring” from a prolonged hibernation, but it is barely doing even that much.

If large numbers of Republican voters are not represented by hard-liners or non-interventionists, one would expect to see numerous would-be candidates moving to fill this void, but instead we see all other likely candidates except Paul rushing to demonstrate how extremely hawkish they are. Luce highlights some of these attempts earlier in his column:

All the other presidential hopefuls are straining to make Bush junior look like Kofi Annan. Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, attacks President Barack Obama for failing to use force against Isis in Iraq. Sounding tough is clearly prized above consistency, since Mr Perry urges Mr Obama to arm the insurgents in Syria. Exhibiting a similar blindness to the limits of US military action, Marco Rubio, the senator from Florida, calls for Mr Obama to “systematically uproot the Isis Caliphate” in Iraq.

As if blundering into three Middle Eastern wars was not enough, Ted Cruz, the senator from Texas, urges Mr Obama to risk a new one by abandoning nuclear talks with Iran.

Both Cruz and Rubio pretend to be occupying some sort of middle ground between the hard-liners and Sen. Paul, but this is just talk to make their views seem more distinctive than they really are. As Luce’s examples remind us, these senators consistently side with the hard-liners on policy, because they assume that placating them is more valuable than crafting a foreign policy that amounts to something more than mindless interventionism. What Luce calls “instinctive militarism” is a loser at the polls in a general election, and it is increasingly unpopular with at least half of the GOP, but so long as the hard-liners have the loudest, busiest, and best-funded activists they will continue to lock almost all leading Republicans into endorsing their dreadful and politically toxic foreign policy.