During an interview with NBC’s Today show on Wednesday, GOP presidential candidate Rand Paul backed away from comments he made in 2007 suggesting that Iran did not pose a threat to the United States. Paul reversed himself just one day after formally announcing his presidential ambitions.
“What I would say is, there has always been a threat of Iran gaining nuclear weapons and I think that’s greater now than it was many years ago. I think we should do everything we can to stop them,” Paul said to host Savannah Guthrie. But in 2007, Paul, then a surrogate for his father’s presidential campaign, told radio host Alex Jones that “Even our own intelligence community consensus opinion now is that they’re not a threat.” “You know, it’s ridiculous to think they’re a threat to our national security,” he added.
Asked to clarify the contradiction, Paul first bickered with the question, challenged Guthrie’s interview skills, and then reluctantly explained that he made his comments before he ran for office. “2007 was a long time ago and events do change over long periods of time,” Paul said. “We’re talking about a time when I wasn’t running for office, when I was helping someone else run for office.” Watch the heated exchange:
Though Iran has expanded its influence over the region since 2007, the American and Israeli intelligence communities have not changed their assessments of Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Both countries still believe, as they did in 2007, that while Iran is moving toward a nuclear weapons capability, the Iranians have not yet made the decision to proceed with a nuclear weapon. American spy agencies also say with, “high confidence,” that Iran had halted its nuclear program in 2003 and has not established secret uranium enrichment sites.
Paul may have been relying on these assessments as recently as 2013, when he called on American policymakers to consider the option of containing a nuclear-armed Iran, a position he implicitly rejected in his interview with Guthrie and in his announcement speech. In remarks to the Heritage Foundation in February of 2013, the first-term senator explained that while he didn’t want “Iran to develop nuclear weapons,” a strategy of containment could be pursued to avoid a larger war.
“Iran does need to know that all options are on the table. But we should not pre-emptively announce that diplomacy or containment will never be an option,” he said.
Paul has already come under fire for his views on Iran. On the same day that he announced his presidential candidacy, a conservative 501(c)4 group, the Foundation for a Secure and Prosperous America, started running a 30-second ad in the early primary states of Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina, highlighting Paul’s 2007 claim that Iran does not pose a threat to the United States. His efforts on Wednesday to clarify his early comments may provide even more fodder for the group.