A controversy has erupted over the fact that in the CBS debate on foreign policy Congressman Ron Paul got only 90 seconds. The congressman’s campaign chairman, Jesse Benton, was quoted by the Hill newspaper in Washington as accusing CBS News of arrogance and of thinking it could choose the next president. “Ninety seconds,” the Hill quoted the campaign’s manager, John Tate as saying, “That’s how much of the first hour of tonight’s GOP debate was given to Ron Paul. 90 measly seconds out of 3,600 seconds.” How premeditated this snub was doesn’t really interest us so much. But this newspaper, for one, reckons that the failure to give Dr. Paul was a missed opportunity.

For Dr. Paul is the one candidate among the Republicans who offers a challenge to the party’s way of thinking. We’re not with Dr. Paul on all of his liberty campaign; as a general matter, he’s far too loath to levy the war on terror. But we have covered him on and off for more than 30 years and have come, even when we disagree with him, to respect him, particularly for his tendency to reach deep into the Constitution. He has done this on foreign policy in several important ways, starting with a bill he introduced in Congress within days of the outbreak of the war that erupted on September 11, 2001.

The bill was the first bid in generations to unleash one of the most important of the constitutional war powers, the letter of marque and reprisal, which is an instrument for bringing private parties into the war. The thinking that went into Dr. Paul’s bill deserves a hearing in any debate in which the GOP contenders are going to be grilled on foreign policy. He would not limit our engagement to letters of marque; he voted to give President George W. Bush authority to take this war to our enemies. But our understanding of Dr. Paul’s position is that he was and is reluctant, to put it mildly, to commit to a vast expedition involving hundreds of billions, even trillions of taxpayer dollars in a war that now engages us in several theaters.

Hence his idea of granting letters of marque to enable private parties to carry this war to our enemies and funding it out of their takings from the enemies they defeat. We used this war instrument against the Barbary Pirates, and the role that non-state actors are playing in this war and the asymmetrical nature of the struggle add up to a situation that is worth more than 90 seconds of debate. Particularly because the differences among the Republicans on other matters abroad were relatively attenuated — and even there, the discussion would have been livelier had Dr. Paul been given more time.

Take the question of foreign aid. We’re perfectly happy with Governor Perry’s proposal for a zero-based approach to foreign aid. We’re glad a blogger asked about Israel, but we were happy with Governor Perry’s answer — which was that Israel too would have to come in with a zero based approach, but he expected and hoped that it would end up with substantial aid, as it has now. In any event, we’d have liked to hear out Congressman Paul on the foreign aid question. He’s against it on constitutional grounds, and he’s against it on the grounds that, to the degree that it often retards free-market development, it can damages the countries that receive aid.

It happens that this is an argument your editor has been making for decades. And the question of the kind of conditionality that we attach to foreign aid hasn’t been in full debate since early in the Reagan years. So we’d have liked to hear Dr. Paul on this head. And we’d have liked to hear him on one other point of foreign policy, which may be the most important of all questions facing America in respect of relations with other countries. This is the monetary question on the 40^th anniversary of the collapse of Bretton Woods and the gold-exchange standard that was at its heart.

Here Dr. Paul is way ahead of the other contenders. We are at a moment when the crisis in Europe has been dragging on for months, even years. No one has been able to figure how to read the price signals between a Eurozone based on a fiat currency and a reserve system based on a dollar that is another fiat currency. Our markets see-saw with each political hiccup in Europe. Then there’s Asia. Where does America come off asking the Chinese communists to adjust their fiat currency higher against our fiat currency?

Ron Paul isn’t the only Republican candidate to comprehend the explosiveness of the monetary issue. Governor Huntsman has consistently warned against starting a trade war disguised as a currency war. But no candidate comes at the question with the perspective Ron Paul has brought to it, one based on constitutional money and the principles that animated the Founders. He wants fundamental monetary reform and an end to the Federal Reserve System. At the debate in New Hampshire he described the other candidates as merely “tinkering.” It would be good the Republican field, for the press as well, and, not to put too fine a point on it, for the rest of the country were Dr. Paul given more than 90 seconds to open up these questions.