By Scott Wong

Political uprisings in the Muslim world, and now the death of Osama bin Laden, are giving rise to a new generation of foreign policy hawks in the Senate who are breaking with the tea party when it comes to America’s role in the world.

Three Republican freshmen — Marco Rubio, Mark Kirk and Kelly Ayotte — share the tea party’s goal of slashing domestic spending but have rejected the movement’s isolationist inclinations and called for greater military action and tougher sanctions overseas in places such as Libya and Syria.

The senators have appeared on cable news programs, written op-eds and introduced bills pushing for more U.S. involvement abroad, and they’re building their national security credentials by taking every chance to travel to conflict zones.

It’s a route that has helped build the careers of prominent senators like Republicans John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and independent Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, who have long driven the foreign policy debate in Washington. For the freshmen, taking the establishment path on foreign policy could help raise their profiles and even lay the groundwork for a presidential bid, which many observers expect of Rubio in 2016.

“For somebody who’s thinking of a presidential run, establishing credibility on foreign policy is essential,” said James Dobbins, director of Rand Corp.’s International Security and Defense Policy Center and President George W. Bush’s representative to the Afghan opposition after the Sept. 11 attacks. “It’s not sufficient, but a necessary part of one’s job criteria is having established that kind of reputation.”

Many presidential candidates have bolstered their credentials before announcing their candidacy, like Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who as a senator, joined the Senate Armed Services Committee and made frequent trips abroad. McCain, Lieberman and Vice President Joe Biden all mounted presidential campaigns as strong foreign policy candidates.

The new breed appears to be following in those footsteps and lining up with their predecessors on ideology, arguing that America should assert its security interests aggressively around the world and intervene with sanctions — and sometimes force — on behalf of democracy.

Rubio, the son of Cuban exiles who fled the Castro regime to Florida, has urged the Obama administration to break ties with Syria and recall the U.S. ambassador to the Arab nation but stopped short of endorsing full military intervention in a fourth overseas conflict.

Ayotte, a New Hampshire military spouse who serves on the Armed Services Committee, wants a broader debate over U.S. military action and spending in Libya, but she’s unequivocal about dictator Muammar Qadhafi: “If we are able to take him out, we should.”

And Kirk, a Navy Reserve intelligence officer from Illinois, teamed up with Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) last week to roll out a bill that would impose new sanctions on Iran to promote human rights and democracy.

“We should always be on the side of dignity of the individual and democracy, and if we can tip a dictatorship into oblivion, we should,” Kirk told Politico.

The freshman trio has set itself apart from the isolationist policies espoused by some tea party classmates. One of the highest profile tea partiers in the Senate, Rand Paul of Kentucky, has called for slashing foreign aid. Paul and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), another tea party sympathizer, introduced an unsuccessful resolution condemning President Barack Obama for failing to seek congressional approval before attacking Libya.

To Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, one of 10 Republicans who backed the measure, the president’s action is unconstitutional and the U.S. mission in Libya unclear.

“I kind of like following the Constitution. It is Congress’s duty and responsibility to declare war, and I think at a minimum, the administration ... should have come to Congress to get approval,” Johnson told Politico. “At this point, it’s just a muddle. We don’t have a clear objective. We haven’t stated it. It’s just not the way to conduct something like this.”

That view clashes with veteran hawks, who have said the president acted within his powers in Libya. Graham took it a step further, calling Qadhafi a “murderer” and suggesting U.S. predator drones should target him.

“He’s the source of the problem. He is not the legitimate leader of Libya,” Graham said last week on “Fox News Sunday.” “He should be brought to justice or killed.”

Ayotte shared Graham’s tough rhetoric, saying she wouldn’t lose sleep if the Libyan strongman was killed in airstrikes on military installations and command centers. Such a strike recently killed members of Qadhafi’s family in Tripoli.

“He’s no longer a legitimate leader, and if we are able to take him out, we should,” Ayotte said. “We’ve already killed members of his family. Getting rid of him would obviously be a way to end this conflict more quickly.”

Rubio used similar language in advocating stricter sanctions against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whose military has killed hundreds of unarmed civilians protesting against the regime. However, no senators have called for military action against Syria.

“I do think the U.S. should be more forceful. ...” Rubio, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, told Politico. “Assad is not a reformer. I think it’s time to admit that and say he’s not a reformer — he’s a murderer.”

For years, McCain, Lieberman and Graham have been fixtures on the Sunday political talk shows, wielding considerable influence over the national security and foreign policy debate in Washington. Close friends, the three serve on the Armed Services Committee and have traveled extensively throughout the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan — often together.

McCain, a retired Navy pilot who spent years in a North Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camp, is the top Republican on Armed Services; Lieberman, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, is married to the daughter of Holocaust survivors and is a fierce defender of Israel; and Graham has served in Iraq and Afghanistan as a colonel in the Air Force Reserve.

The freshman hawks are taking a page out of the senior senators’ playbook. Rubio recently fired off a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), arguing that ousting Qadhafi is in America’s “national interest.” And he wrote an op-ed in Foreign Policy magazine, saying the U.S. should expand sanctions against Syria, “sever ties and recall the ambassador at once.”

Last month, Kirk took to CBS’s “Face the Nation,” urging the Obama administration to impose diplomatic sanctions on Syria and to voice stronger support for protesters. He spent the Easter recess traveling through Bahrain, Djibouti, Kenya and Somalia to get a firsthand look at piracy off the East African coast.

Meanwhile, both Rubio and Ayotte joined McConnell, Graham and others on a January visit to Afghanistan and Pakistan to assess military efforts there.

McCain, Lieberman and Graham “seem encouraged that there are others who are new to the Senate that are interested in these issues, [because] these issues have kind of fallen off the radar screen,” Rubio said.

Like the senior hawks, the freshman senators don’t support ending the Afghanistan war or accelerating Obama’s plan to begin drawing down the 100,000 troops stationed there. And while they’re raising questions about what Pakistan knew about bin Laden’s whereabouts, they don’t believe the U.S. should end its relationship with Islamabad.

“To think of the entire country with one broad brush shows ignorance in the face of what is the complexity of Pakistan,” Kirk said. “Some people in Pakistan are with us; some are against us.”

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