Ted Cruz is not Rand Paul.
Despite the impression you might get if you take seriously the overheated rhetoric of presidential campaigns, the junior senator from Texas, who has a shot at the Republican nomination, is not a clone of the junior senator from Kentucky, who does not.
The differences between the two men particularly on national security and foreign policy may help explain why explain why Cruz, already regarded as a frontrunner for the nomination, is gaining momentum, and why Paul, languishing in single digits, was allowed into Tuesday's grown-up debate on something of a technicality.
Paul is a libertarian non-interventionist. His views represent a small slice of the Republican primary electorate. And while he's made repeated efforts to sound more hawkish, he seems more comfortable blasting "neocons" in his own party than he is criticizing a president who has sought to avoid military conflict at nearly every turn.
Cruz is running for president as an old-school foreign policy realist and has frequently placed himself somewhere in the middle of the foreign policy/national security spectrum, roughly in between the isolationists on one side and the uber-interventionists on the other.
The history is more complicated. Over Cruz's time in the senate, he has at times sounded like Paul and at others like the hawks that make Paul so furious. Sources in Cruz world say that's consistent with Cruz's balanced approach to national security and foreign affairs. Critics suggest it reflects an opportunistic approach to these issues, an indication of his willingness to shift positions based on polls and public sentiment.
One prominent Republican foreign policy thinker describes meeting Cruz during the summer of 2013, several months after Cruz was sworn in to the Senate. The men compared notes on a variety of issues: the political environment in Washington, foreign policy and national security, and a possible Cruz presidential bid in 2016. That final topic struck this Republican as a bit presumptuous, given that Cruz hadn't yet been in the Senate for a full year. But he knew Cruz was smart and believed it'd be foolish to dismiss the possibility because it didn't fit with convention.
As Cruz laid out his governing vision, he argued that the center of gravity in the Republican Party had shifted on foreign policy and national security from the kind of interventionism practiced by George W. Bush to something closer to the spare disengagement preferred by Rand Paul. According to this source, Cruz understood that Paul's non-interventionism was a tough sell to a Republican Party dominated by hawks. Cruz then made the case that he was a more acceptable non-interventionist. "He said that Rand occupied a big space in the party on national security issues, but that Rand is a bit too extreme. He told me he could be a more acceptable version of Rand's vision to mainstream Republicans."
There is much in Cruz's record and his rhetoric to support this view. Cruz, a member of the Senate Armed Service Committee, has voted no on each of the National Defense Authorization Acts during his tenure in Congress, citing his objection to laws that would permit the indefinite detention of an American citizen.
By contrast, Cruz voted to support a 2014 budget proposal offered by Paul that would have dramatically cut military spending and redirected U.S. national security priorities in a manner consistent with Paul's dovish tendencies. The language Paul used to describe his budget and its goals could well have been borrowed from Barack Obama.
Paul wrote that his "budget provides an outlineto reduce the size and scope of the military complex, including its global footprint to one that is more in line with a policy of containment." Indeed, it would have. Over a ten-year budget window, Paul's proposal would have provided $300 billion less than Obama's budget.
Paul boasted that his budget did not just reduce spending, but defense personnel, too. "This budget proposal does not simply reduce military spending, but provides directives to realign the military for the 21st Century," he wrote. "It also proposes to utilize modern innovation and technology in a way that would provide the capability to begin replacing and reducing our 1.4 million person military to a size more consistent with the needs of our defense."
It's often said of budget proposals that they're far more than just numbers: they are plans for how to govern. The Paul budget was no exception. His budget proposal would have dramatically reduced spending on defense and other national security priorities, diminishing the ability of the United States to shape events in a manner that would further our interests.
Despite his agreement with Paul on the overall direction of U.S. defense priorities, Cruz used his friend as one of two poles in GOP national security thinking and not in a favorable way. Without specifying their policy differences, Cruz described his approach to foreign policy as something of a compromise between the views of Rand Paul and John McCain.
Paul wasn't happy. In a series of statements and op-eds, he accused Cruz of "mischaracterizing" his views and complained that his friend was "splintering" the Republican Party.
I had a long dinner with Cruz at the time and asked him about Paul's attacks. He responded to a question about differences with Paul with a lengthy answer about the importance of speaking out on behalf of freedom across the world. Cruz didn't mention Paul, who had criticized GOP hawks for bellicose rhetoric on Vladimir Putin and Russia, but there was no question that Paul was the target of his remarks, which I reported on:
I think it would be a wonderful outcome if every Republican across the spectrum followed the model of Ronald Reagan and spoke with a clarion clarity for freedom and against oppressionspoke out against Russian aggression before they march into Ukraine, spoke out against Venezuelan aggression as Maduro murders protesters fighting for freedom, spoke out and called for the freedom of Leopoldo Lpez, the opposition leader wrongfully imprisoned because Maduro is afraid of the desire for freedom of his citizens, and stood resolutely for vigorous sanctions against Iran, for using every tool necessary, including if necessary overwhelming military force, to prevent them from acquiring nuclear weapons. That is a Reaganesque foreign policy, and nothing would make me happier than seeing every Republican in the United States Senate embrace that foreign policy.
In recent days, Cruz has been fighting with a different Republican rival. After Senator Marco Rubio criticized Cruz for voting to roll back the National Security Agency's bulk data collection program, Cruz has suggested that Rubio's foreign policy is virtually indistinguishable from that of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
To make his point, Cruz has elevated the importance of events in Egypt, Libya, and Syria as he campaigns around the country. In each of these instances, he argues, Rubio has supported the Obama/Clinton approach with disastrous results. And while Cruz is right that Rubio backed Obama and Clinton on certain aspects of their decisionmaking in the revolutions in these countries, Cruz's version of history is highly selective.
In an interview last week with Mark Levin, Cruz criticized Rubio, Lindsey Graham and other members of what he called the "Washington establishment" for their mistakes.
You're right, the Washington establishment they have, over and over again, supported Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. They supported them when they toppled the government in Libya, they handed the government over to radical Islamic terrorists. They are supporting Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton when they want to topple the government in Syria. If they succeed in that, they'll hand that government over to radical Islamic terrorists. And you're not doing U.S. national security a favor when you topple a stable government and put ISIS and al Qaeda or other people that are waging jihad against us in power. They did that in Egypt, where they toppled Mubarak and put the Muslim Brotherhood, a terrorist organization, in power.
Levin noted that U.S. interests would have been much better served had the Shah of Iran remained in power than the fundamentalists who followed him. Then, after the talk show host raised additional questions about what he called "the democracy project" legitimate ones, I might add Cruz offered something of a summary.
"In each of those instances, whether Qaddaffi, whether Mubarak, whether Assad, whether the Shah the dictators were killing the terrorists, we killed the dictators, and as a result now the terrorists are killing us."
This is, to put it charitably, ahistorical.
For the sake of argument, we'll stipulate that the dictators were, in Cruz's overly broad formulation, "killing the terrorists." And we'll set aside the fact that in several cases they were also killing non-terrorists who opposed their regimes, including the western-style democrats with whom we might find common cause.
Even with those exceptions, Cruz's history is muddled. Mubarak and Assad are still alive. Qaddaffi was killed while the U.S. was supporting air strikes on the regime, but Libyans killed him, not Americans. And the U.S. supported the Shah to the very end and never supported the revolutionaries who booted him from power. So Cruz is just wrong when he says "we killed the dictators."
But it's the conclusion of his syllogism that is particularly troubling, particularly the causality of his final claim: "as a result, the terrorists are killing us."
This is a common trope of non-interventionists on the left and the right that the United States is somehow responsible for the actions of those who hate us. The terrorists in Egypt, Libya, Syria and elsewhere are not waging war against us because we killed the dictators that attempted to kill them, however good that rhetorical triptych might have sounded as it rolled off the tongue. The terrorists are targeting us because of who we are and what we represent, not because the U.S. has projected power in the region.
That sounds like something Rand Paul might say. And Ted Cruz is no Rand Paul.
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Ted Cruz is not Rand Paul | The Weekly Standard