Ted Cruz's New Foreign Policy Isn't Conservative

Ted Cruz's New Foreign Policy Isn't Conservative

08/01/14

John Allen Gay

Ideology, The Presidency, United States, Iran, Ukraine

He doesn't like nation building, but he still pushes the same idealism that conservatives have been fighting for centuries.

Texas senator Ted Cruz is one of the more interesting of the potential 2016 Republican nominees. He’s an Ivy Leaguer who enjoys strong support from the Tea Party. He was a collegiate debate champion, yet his most famous public appearance saw him reading Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham on the Senate floor. And he’s consciously trying to beat a new path for the GOP on foreign policy, explicitly stating that he’s “somewhere in between” the party’s hawkish and dovish wings, and arguing he draws lessons from both. It’s hard not to see political tactics here: in a presidential primary, Cruz would be competing with Rand Paul for Tea Party votes and thus needs to distinguish himself from the Kentucky senator. Taking a more aggressive line on foreign policy than Sen. Paul is probably the least risky way to do that—it makes him more palatable to the Republican establishment, and it’s unlikely to cost him many primary votes. Cruz’s new direction might be good politics. But is it conservative?

The Ted Cruz foreign-policy approach appears to have two distinctive features: an increased emphasis on moral leadership, particularly on matters of human rights, and a decreased emphasis on nation building. Cruz, writes the Daily Beast’s Eli Lake, “is an American exceptionalist who is wary of remaking the world in America’s exceptional image.” Cruz’s words to Lake: “It’s not the job of the U.S. military to do nation building or produce democratic utopias.”

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