Cruz pitches tough foreign policy

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) offered a tough foreign policy vision on Thursday, seeking to ground it in a sense of political realism that he repeatedly tied to President Ronald Reagan.

In a roughly hourlong speech at the conservative Heritage Foundation, Cruz dismissed calls for American power to aggressively advance democracy, instead claiming that he would take a “dime-store dictator” over the chaos that allows extremism to breed.

{mosads}“We will not win by replacing dictators, as unpleasant as they may be, with terrorists who want to destroy America,” Cruz claimed, in a speech aiming to show his deftness with foreign policy.

“We do not betray the idea of America by accepting reality.”

The vision is likely to upset critics of the GOP presidential candidate, who could accuse him of abandoning American ideals of democracy and free expression. Yet the realpolitik also offers a potentially valuable middle ground that acknowledges more aggressive calls for American intervention across the globe and current concerns about global terrorism.

As a practical matter, Cruz appeared ready to largely abandon diplomatic efforts to remove Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad from power, claiming that doing so would only yield the same kind of “failed state” that befell Libya following the ousting of Moammar Gadhafi in 2011.

“Quite simply, we do not have a side in the Syria civil war,” Cruz said, in comments that seem targeted at some of his fellow Republicans, such as Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who has advocated a tough military response to root out Assad.

“It is not difficult to find politicians in Washington who will thunder, ‘We must topple Assad,’ with the same audacity that they thundered, ‘We must topple Gaddafi,’ ‘We must topple [former Egyptian strongman Hosni] Mubarak,’” he said. “And we’ve seen the catastrophic results of these policies.”

The only limits, he said, were on extremist groups like the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which threaten America’s security.

Trump repeated his barbs against the Obama administration, which he said has “ignore[d] the reality that our nation is under attack” from radicalism spread by ISIS.

“The fact is the problem has been festering unattended for the entire Obama administration,” Cruz claimed, yet it has been “peripheral, at best, to [President Obama’s] core progressive agenda.”

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), one of Cruz’s strongest opponents in the race for the GOP nomination, has repeatedly blasted the Texan’s support for surveillance reforms earlier this summer. Rubio has seized on the nation’s new fears about terrorism to use Cruz’s efforts to rein in the National Security Agency (NSA) against him.

Yet Cruz on Thursday offered some of his toughest rebuttals yet, putting Rubio, and others who are trying to undo the reforms, in the same camp as Obama and congressional Democrats, who have eyed new gun laws in response to the wave of mass violence.

“There are some on both the right and the left who want to exploit the current crisis by calling on Americans to surrender our constitutional liberties as the only way to ensure our safety,” Cruz said.

“Hoarding tens of billions of records of ordinary citizens didn’t stop Fort Hood, it didn’t stop Boston, it didn’t stop Garland and it failed to stop the San Bernardino plot,” he claimed, referring to past homegrown attacks apparently inspired by a radical version of Islam.

“When the focus of law enforcement and national security is on ordinary citizens rather than targeting the bad guys, we miss the bad guys while violating the constitutional rights of Americans.”