Irish American Congressman Peter King has stated that he is definitely considering running for president as reported here on Thursday.

“I’m going to certainly give it thought. I’m going to see where it goes,” King said during an interview with ABC News.

King has been the most prominent politician in Washington on Irish issues for the past 20  years, especially outspoken on Northern Ireland. He played a major part in the American role in the Irish peace process.

He said foreign policy would be a big consideration. “My concern right now is I don’t see anyone at the national level speaking enough on, to me, what’s important – national security, homeland security, counterterrorism.”

He said he opposed the tea party candidates. “I would hope that our party is not defined by Rand Paul and Ted Cruz,” King said.

“I’m not crazy about Rand Paul and Ted Cruz. But on the other hand, you know, guys like Chris Christie and Jeb Bush, I have a lot of regard for.

“The big debate that Republicans seem to have in the Senate on foreign policy is whether or not, you know, the CIA was going to use a drone to kill an American in Starbucks,” he said.

“To me, we should be going beyond that and we should go back to being a party – whether it’s Eisenhower, Reagan, Bush – of having a strong national defense, and that should be, to me, an essential part of the presidential debate. And so far, that’s missing.”

King expressed “some mixed feelings” about Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.,

“The fact, coming from Florida, he voted against the Sandy aid to New York, I know that is a parochial issue, but that was also an issue of life and death for my district,” King said. “For a guy whose state got billions of dollars in the past for hurricane and storm relief to [be] posturing against New York, I thought it was cheap politics.”

“Obviously, the economy is important, but the first requirement in the Constitution is to defend the country against foreign attack and provide for national defense,” he said. “The only way that’s been brought up [so far by other contenders] is to how quickly we can withdraw troops and whether or not drones can be used to kill Americans. That, to me, is not a debate that a party of national defense should be leading with.”

“I’m going to see where it goes,” he said. “It does give me, at the very least, a forum to get my views out there on the direction I think the Republican Party should be following on foreign policy and not just back ourselves into an isolationist corner, and we’ll see where it goes from there.”

“Anything can happen,” he said. “It’s a great country.”