Thursday, Sen. Ted Cruz delivered a foreign policy speech that was meant to carve out a position between the interventionist and isolationist wings of the Republican party. Instead, the candidate for the Republican nomination for president of the United States showed that his ship of state would tack erratically in foreign waters between the policy of the current White House and incoherence.
Of course Americans are dissatisfied with the recent direction of U.S. foreign policy. Inconclusive results in two wars, a willful decline in American leadership, growing unease among traditional allies in every corner of the globe, a deeply flawed nuclear deal with a state sponsor of terror that will almost surely lead to nuclear proliferation in one of the world's most volatile regions, and menacing U.S. rivals, especially Russia and China, emboldened: These and other issues have convinced the American public that a new direction, new ideas, and new energy are necessary for whoever will lead America out into the world. At the Heritage Foundation Thursday, Cruz looked to the past to point to the future.
He spoke approvingly of Ronald Reagan's foreign policy, and cited "Dictatorships and Double Standards," Jeane Kirkpatrick's landmark 1979 essay. Reagan's U.N. ambassador from 1981-1985, Kirkpatrick distinguished between totalitarian regimes aligned with the Soviet Union and authoritarian dictatorships that the United States must work with to advance its interest, even as those regimes violate an array of human rights that Americans rightly prize. Cruz's apparent interpretation of the essay suggests that he doesn't have a very clear grasp of Kirkpatrick's argument or what's wrong with Obama's foreign policy.
Seeking to separate himself from the Bush administration as well as the Obama White House, Cruz thinks it was a mistake to topple Saddam Hussein, and other Arab regime chiefs, like Hosni Mubarak and Muammar Qaddafi. Cruz argued that "if we refuse to work with countries that do not meet our democratic standards … we risk fundamentally undermining [our] goals and so too our national security."
What countries does Cruz have in mind? Does he mean China, which certainly doesn't meet our democratic standards? Or does he mean even harder cases, like the rogue regimes that Obama promised to engage before he was elected in 2008? Is Cruz saying he, too, like Obama, intends to work with the Islamic Republic of Iran? There is no doubt that when Obama started sending letters to Iran's supreme leader, he told himself that he was practicing realpolitik. When the regime started shooting protestors in the streets of Tehran, and the entire world looked to the White House for moral guidance and strategic leadership, the 44th president of the United States surely congratulated himself that he was the guy with the stomach to make the tough calls and strike a deal that would keep Americans and the world safe. So how is Cruz different from Obama?
Cruz is open about his willingness to traffic with another rogue regime that the current administration has engaged—Bashar al-Assad's Syria. Cruz misleadingly argues that his Syria policy is similar to Israel's: "I would note that my view that we don't have a side in the Syrian civil war is shared by at least one other world leader with a clear eye and a direct vision of what's happening," said Cruz, "Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu."
But this is not Israel's policy. Since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, senior Israeli officials, including Netanyahu, have been quite clear that Assad should go. Israel's operations in Syria have all been directed against Assad's partners in the Iranian axis, including Iranian arms convoys headed to Hezbollah and weapons depots throughout Syria. Moreover, Israel is quietly cooperating with various anti-Assad rebel groups in order to keep Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps and Hezbollah units from opening another front on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights.
To the extent it seems that Netanyahu has changed his tune over the last several months and now says that Israel has no dog in this fight, the reason for that is Russia's recent escalation. To state openly that Israel wants Assad gone, the IRGC and Hezbollah vanquished, is to take a public position against Vladimir Putin. So why would the Texas senator follow Netanyahu's lead here? Are there Russian troops in Oklahoma? Israel is a country with some 6 million Jews that is loathed by nearly every country in the Middle East and has to play its hand very carefully. Cruz wants to become the commander-in-chief of a superpower that determines which way the world turns. The United States is supposed to take sides.
In fact, Cruz is not taking his lead on Syria from Israel. Like Obama, he is simply using Jerusalem as cover. When the Syrian civil war first started, the White House repeatedly leaked that the reason it wasn't moving to depose Assad is because Israel preferred the devil it knew to the one it didn't. However, Israel's then-ambassador to Washington, Michael Oren, wrote to the Wall Street Journal, twice, to deny assertions "that Israel has expressed fears of instability in Syria if leader Bashar al-Assad is overthrown." Oren continued: "Israel has expressed no such concerns. Allied with Iran, Mr. Assad has helped supply 55,000 rockets to Hezbollah and 10,000 to Hamas, very likely established a clandestine nuclear arms program and profoundly destabilized the region. The violence he has unleashed on his own people demonstrating for freedoms confirms Israel's fears that the devil we know in Syria is worse than the devil we don't."
The reality is that Cruz, like Obama, is effectively aligning with Assad. To be sure, the Syrian dictator is a bad guy, who has been an ally to and at times a puppet of Iran and an enemy to the United States and Israel," "said Cruz. But "For as bad as Assad was and is, radical jihadis controlling Syria would be a significant turn for the worse. Nothing that has happened in the past two and a half years has given me any more confidence that intervention in the Syrian civil war is in America's interest."
Well, one issue that should have gotten the senator's attention over the last few months is the refugee crisis that threatens to destabilize Europe. The vast majority of Syrian refugees are Sunni Arabs in flight from Assad's campaign of sectarian cleansing. It is Assad, rather than the Islamic State, that is responsible for the bulk of Syrian migrants. To contain the refugee crisis, Assad has to go.
Further, Assad represents a strategic threat to Israel—which is America's key Middle East ally. Iran is fighting to save Assad because it believes only this configuration of the Alawite regime is capable of ensuring Tehran's supply line to Hezbollah.
Pushing out Assad would thwart Tehran's expansionist project throughout the Middle East, encompassing, as Iranian officials like to boast, four Arab capitals—Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad, and Sanaa. Right now a soon-to-be-nuclear Iran is sitting on the border of key U.S. regional partners, including Israel, Jordan, and Turkey, while threatening other traditional American allies in the Persian Gulf. Indeed getting rid of Assad, and ensuring that the conflagration spreading throughout the region is not resolved to the detriment of the Sunni Arab majority is at present the most consequential issue to Sunni allies like Saudi Arabia. Obama sought regional realignment with Tehran because he prefers the Iranians. Why is Cruz tilting against the Sunnis?
Like Obama, Cruz, too, wants to back the Kurds, without distinguishing between pro-American Kurdish institutions, like the Kurdistan Regional Government, and other Kurdish groupings like the Kurdistan Workers' Party, a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization making war on Turkey, a NATO member.
Cruz, to be fair, promises that unlike Obama, he'll really let ISIS have it. He'll bomb them a lot. The difference between Cruz and Obama is that the president knows his campaign against ISIS is phony. The way to strip ISIS of its prestige and deal it a major blow is to attack it in its center of gravity—Iraq and Syria. That can't be done by simply bombing Raqqa, but it doesn't require a major U.S. troop deployment in the Middle East.
The United States needs to convince the Arab tribes spreading across the Syrian desert that have signed on with ISIS to once again take up arms against foreign fighters and the former military and intelligence officers of Saddam Hussein's regime. It's been done before—that's how the Bush administration won the surge. But before the tribes take on the Chechens, the Saudis, the Brits and whoever else constitutes the Islamic State at this point, the White House will need to assure them, and then make good on the promise, that it will push back hard against Iran and its various allies, including Hezbollah, and Iraq's Shiite militias, and get rid of Assad, in any way possible.
But of course Obama won't do that, he won't go against Tehran, because it would threaten to upset his signature foreign policy initiative, the nuclear deal with Iran and consequently regional realignment. Obama has a real Middle East strategy—a terrible one, as it happens, which has jeopardized American interests from the Persian Gulf and the eastern Mediterranean, to Western Europe and the American homeland. As I've argued previously, it's going to be very difficult to turn around Obama's foreign policy no matter who comes to office. A Cruz presidency that follows the line laid down in this address would likely ensure a continuation of this disaster.