Fred Thompson: hawk or dove?

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The Weekly Standard reported Tuesday that three respected Republican foreign policy hawks have signed on to advise soon-to-be presidential candidate Fred Thompson, currently the toast of the Reagan wing of the GOP.

The three advisors are Mark Esper, who previously worked for Thompson in the Senate and who was Bill Frist’s foreign relations guy, Joel Shin, who worked for the Bush campaign and is now with the Scowcroft Group, and Liz Cheney, the vice president’s daughter and woman who, as principal deputy assistant secretary of state for the near east, oversaw the “democracy” agenda in the Middle East.

Does this mean that we can expect some hawkish stands from Fred Thompson? There’s little indication of that so far.

In fact, Thompson was on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” earlier this week sounding downright dovish on Iran. The Iran “problem” Thompson said, “might just take care of itself” if America played a Cold War style game of “intelligence and propaganda” correctly.

So seeking regime change is not in Thompson’s playbook? Doesn’t sound like it. “Because an [internal] revolution hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean it can’t,” he concluded.

That sounds more like a dovish strategy of containment to me.