Scott McConnell gets a bit carried away by the Paul Ryan news:

Second, (though haven’t parsed the record yet) he has no reputation as a big tub-thumper on waging wars in the Middle East; indeed, serious concern about America’s fiscal state almost precludes support for an excessively hawkish foreign policy.

I suppose it’s true that Ryan hasn’t distinguished himself as a “tub-thumper” on these issues. He has been reliably hawkish in his voting in the House throughout his career. I assume that anyone taking cues from Charles Krauthammer supports what Scott and I would regard as an excessively hawkish foreign policy, and I don’t know of anything Ryan has ever said or done that would make me think otherwise. Ryan’s record of fiscal irresponsibility when Bush was in office doesn’t give me a lot of confidence on the second point, and his support for increased military spending gives us another reason to assume that Ryan considers the military budget essentially off limits. Scott is right that “serious concern about America’s fiscal state almost precludes support for an excessively hawkish foreign policy,” but so far when those two have been in conflict Ryan has favored the latter rather than the former. There may be other good things to say about the Ryan choice, but Ryan’s foreign policy isn’t one of them.

Update: Ryan was rattling off boilerplate hawkish talking points to Robert Costa three years ago. He described the “reset” as appeasement, and criticized Obama as “Nixonian” for not being enough of an activist on human rights. He didn’t forget to complain about Obama’s response to the Green movement: “The movement against the regime there is seen by Obama as nothing more than a group of meddling protestors who are getting in the way of cutting a deal with the mullahs. The brave Iranians who are fighting for freedom and democracy have just been disregarded by this administration.” It’s as if he’s doing a bad Pawlenty impression.