By Jonathan Chait, NY MAGAZINE
A few weeks ago, Ted Cruz committed a shocking act of heresy against the Republican Party Establishment. “If you look at President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and, for that matter, some of the more aggressive Washington neocons,” he told Bloomberg News, “they have consistently misperceived the threat of radical Islamic terrorism and have advocated military adventurism that has had the effect of benefiting radical Islamic terrorists.”
Cruz was cleverly making a point about the Obama administration’s intervention in Libya, which resulted in a failed state that has nurtured ISIS, but his attack cut much deeper than it might have first appeared. One of the supporters of that venture was Marco Rubio, Cruz’s primary rival for the affection of regular (non-Trump-loving) Republicans. Rather than frame his contrast with Rubio as a matter of personal judgment or partisan loyalty, though, Cruz defined his opponents in ideological terms (“the more aggressive Washington neocons”). Indirectly, he was reminding his audience of another country in the Middle East where neocon military adventurism has wound up benefiting Islamic extremism — and harking back to an older conservative approach.
While Trump has distracted the party with bombastic grossness, Cruz has undertaken a concerted attack on an unexpected weak point: the belief structure, inherited by Rubio, that undergirds the party’s foreign-policy orthodoxy, opening up a full-blown doctrinal schism on the right.
The Iraq War remains the Republican Party’s least favorite subject, but the principles that drove the Bush administration into Baghdad (without a plan for the occupation) have remained largely intact. Most Republican leaders still espouse the neoconservative belief in confronting autocratic governments everywhere, that demonstrations of American military power will inevitably succeed, and that the championing of democratic values should inform all major foreign-policy strategy.
When he first came to Washington, Rubio distanced himself from these beliefs. “I don’t want to come across as some sort of saber-rattling person,” he said in 2012, the next year insisting that higher military spending be paid for with offsetting cuts elsewhere. The next year, he started rattling sabers. Rubio came to support higher defense spending even if it increased the deficit, and turned sharply against the Iran nuclear deal. Now a full-scale hawk poised to restore the banished Bush doctrine, Rubio has surrounded himself with neoconservative advisers, using buzzwords like “moral clarity,” and promised to stand up to Russia, China, Cuba, and North Korea, unworried by the possibility that standing up to some of the bad guys might require the cooperation of other bad guys. “I’m ready for Marco,” enthused William Kristol.
The Bush years trained liberals to think of neoconservatism as the paramount expression of right-wing foreign-policy extremism. But neoconservatism runs against the grain of an older and deeper conservative tradition of isolationism. Cruz has flitted about the edges of the libertarian right, sometimes forming alliances in the Senate with Rand Paul, an isolationist who — after briefly being in vogue — has largely been marginalized within his party. At the last Republican foreign-policy debate, Cruz identified himself with that creed more openly than he ever had. Just as Rubio’s buzzwords signal his neoconservative affiliation, Cruz conveyed his isolationism by calling for an “American-first foreign policy” and dismissing Rubio as a “Woodrow Wilson democracy promoter.” The face-off between Rubio and Cruz at that debate represented something far more profound than the usual exchange of canned sound bites.
The isolationist tradition has long been misunderstood to mean a policy that perished overnight on December 7, 1941, and that promoted complete withdrawal from world affairs. In fact, isolationist thought grew out of — and, in some ways, represented the apogee of — American exceptionalism.
It regarded other, lesser countries with disgust, a sentiment that bred the competing impulses to both be distant from the rest of the world and to strike out at it.
Isolationism dominated conservative thought from the end of World War I — as a reaction against Wilson’s costly democratization crusade, as Cruz implied — through Pearl Harbor. After the war, without losing its hold on large segments of the GOP, the worldview mutated in the face of communism. The Soviet threat intensified the contradiction between the desire to quarantine America from the communist contagion and to eradicate it. The old isolationists resolved the tension by developing a fixation on airpower as a substitute for diplomacy and land forces. American planes would allow it to dominate the world while remaining literally above it. (Airpower, wrote the historian Frances FitzGerald, “would allow America both to pursue its God-given mission abroad and to remain the virgin land, uncorrupted by the selfish interests of others or foreign doctrines.”)
Republican leaders opposed the Truman administration’s plans to rebuild Europe, create NATO, and station a huge land force in West Germany. Instead, they proposed a massive air force. The right’s belief in the efficacy of bombing was enabled by its indifference to widespread carnage among enemy civilians. Conservatives like Barry Goldwater proposed using nuclear weapons during the Vietnam War. “If we maintain our faith in God, love of freedom, and superior global airpower, the future looks good,”said Air Force general Curtis LeMay, who had also called for nuclear strikes against North Vietnam. (In 1968, LeMay ran as vice-president alongside the segregationist George Wallace, a campaign that prefigured Trump’s combination of populism, white racial backlash, and an ultranationalist foreign policy.)
Republican presidents like Eisenhower and Nixon, though, followed Truman’s internationalist program rather than the unworkable fever dreams of the right. The bipartisan embrace of internationalism sent isolationism into a long, slow decline, its ideas circulating but without influence, a philosophy for newsletter cranks. Eventually, the dominant Republican foreign policy evolved once more, into neoconservatism, which combined the Wilsonian fervor for exporting democracy abroad with the isolationist distrust of diplomacy. The neoconservative project imploded in Iraq, but still, even in the 2008 and 2012 campaigns, the lone voice of dissent on neoconservative foreign policy was the libertarian gadfly Ron Paul, who brought isolationism back into the conversation. The surprisingly durable support for an odd little man in poorly fitting suits who kept ranting about gold indicated a potentially underserved market for Republican discontent over Iraq.
The Paul version of isolationism, inherited by his floundering son, emphasizes the live-and-let-live principle. Cruz’s version is more bloodthirsty, putting him in touch with the current, freaked-out conservative mood while reviving the bombing obsession of the mid-century conservatives. “We will utterly destroy ISIS,” he boasted recently with LeMay-esque ghoulishness. “We will carpet-bomb them into oblivion. I don’t know if sand can glow in the dark, but we’re going to find out.” (Cruz’s choice of imagery is important: Conventional bombing does not make things glow, but nuclear bombing does.) At the debate, Rubio shot back, “Airstrikes are a key component of defeating them, but they must be defeated on the ground by a ground force.” When pressed by moderators on the details of their respective plans, both Cruz and Rubio retreated. Cruz admitted he would not, in fact, level the cities held by ISIS (which are populated mostly by their unwilling captives) but would instead simply bomb ISIS’s military positions, which Obama is already doing. Rubio admitted he would not dispatch an occupying force back to the Middle East but merely send a small number of special forces while attempting to recruit local Sunnis, which Obama is also already doing.
Substantively empty though their bluster may be, Rubio and Cruz are pantomiming a deep-rooted, significant breach. While he has very little support among party elites, Cruz seems to believe that Republican voters are hungry for a candidate who will challenge their party’s foreign policy at the ideological level. Very soon, we will find out if he is right.
*This article appears in the December 28, 2015 issue of New YorkMagazine.
ArnoldHarris Said:
me too
here is something amusing
he knows how to rub their faces in shiite 😛
@ bernard ross:
The fact that one of Trump’s key policies is to work against established corporate interests — especially regarding international trade and cheap labor immigration that takes jobs away from Americans is one of the key reasons I decided last summer to back him for the US presidency.
He doesn’t waste his breath on bullshit and neither do I.
I don’t know exactly what Adelson represents, and I couldn’t care less. Israel needs a home-grown power base and national independence to match it, not dependence on Jewish-American millionaires who imagine they ought to have influence among the rulers of the two main political parties here. In any case our Jewish nation ought to know from bitter experience how little their money counts when push comes to shove among the goyim.
Arnold Harris, Outspeaker
@ ArnoldHarris:
I thought that Adelson was leaning earlier towards him. rubio represents those interests supporting visas to replace US tech workers in the US by foreigners. Unlike the corporate establishment republicans Trump actually works against established corporate interests such as on trade and immigration.
@ bernard ross:
Of the Republican presidential candidates, only Marco Rubio’s name appears on the list cited above. But Rubio shows little likelihood of winning the Republican Party nomination for president. As far as I am concerned, there is something about Rubio that comes across as just a little too slick to be trusted.
Arnold Harris, Outspeaker
@ ArnoldHarris:
Arnold – Cruz and Trump met early in the campaign, and their lack of going after each other, even in televised debates, has been a very notable aspect of this campaign. A couple of weeks ago, Trump made a somewhat half-hearted attack on Cruz; Limbaugh (who has had praise for both of them) took him to task for it, and Trump did something he just about never does – he took it back.
Clearly, there is something in the works between the two; I have no reason to doubt the scenario you posed above.
And my friend – Happy (Western) New Year.
@ Eric R.:
If Cruz wants a seat on the United States Supreme Count, then he first needs a Republican president who would put him there with the advice and consent of the United States Senate.
But who could that president be, other than Trump? And he surely would not do that on behalf of a Republican presidential candidate who attempted to intimidate him in a name-calling contest such as that of the latest foolish member of the Bush family empire.
Therefore, it would surely be in Cruz’s long-term interest to help engineer a victorious election for Trump, who is just about the only Republican candidate known to keep his word in any deal in which he engages himself.
But nobody gets on the United States Supreme Court is appointed to that august body except upon the death or retirement of one of the nine Supreme Court justices.
So how long would candidate and US Senator Cruz to do while waiting for a Supreme Court vacancy? And suppose there were not to be such a vacancy for many years?
This all suggests a multifold strategy:
First, Cruz should back Trump for the presidency and make sure no ugliness against Trump makes its way into his nomination campaign.
Second, he should approach Trump for the biggest deal of his life. (Cruz’s life, not Trump’s.) The deal would be thus:
Trump promises Cruz the vice presidential nomination. Assuming they both win over Clinton and Whomever, Trump get the White House and Cruz gets whatever place they park US vice presidents. But Vice President Cruz would get first crack at a Supreme Court seat as soon as one would become available through death or retirement. Cruz would then resign his vice-presidency as soon as the US Senate voted his confirmation. Trump would then appoint a replacement vice president, using whichever criterial mix he would consider suitable for his and the country’s purposes.
I welcome lucid and arguable comments for or against my proposed strategy outlined here.
Arnold Harris, Outspeaker
ArnoldHarris Said:
Bill Clinton was all set to nominate Mario Cuomo to the Supreme Court, even though he had no experience as judge. At the last minute, at Shrillary’s urging, he nominated Comrade Ginsburg since Hillary wanted a liberal woman on the court.
Cruz has argued effectively in front of the Court, including as the Solicitor General of Texas. I’d love to see Cruz as President, but best case scenario is that he serves there 8 years. At age 45 or 46, he could be on the court 30+ years. And as was done with Rehnquist, a future GOP President could move him from Associate Justice to Chief Justice.
Some of these candidates are frankly running in the hope of being in a GOP cabinet. Chris Christie (full disclosure, he is my governor and I voted for him twice – whatever you say about him at a national level, he has held a tax happy left-wing state assembly in check for 7+ years) is not conservative enough or populist enough to win the nomination, but would be palatable as an attorney general – although my favorite for that post, if he would take it at his age (he will be 70 in 2017), is Giuliani.
@ Eric R.:
@ watsa46:
Eric, few politicians get nominated or appointed to the United States Supreme Court without prior judicial experience of a far higher level than Senator Cruz has experienced. Furthermore, I don’t think Cruz or his backers would have undertaken to win top place in the present Republican nomination circus merely to promote the senator to a back-door sure-shot at the Supreme Court. In any case, from the situation now prevailing, it would be far easier to maneuver Cruz into a vice presidency with Trump.
Watsa, your observation about a Chinese aircraft carrier is interesting, and is duly noted as such. But it is about as far off-topic in this particular discussion as it would have been had you offered up a recipe for blueberry pie.
———-
Everybody:
Nate Cohn has published an interesting article in today’s New York Times which shows that Trump’s strongest appeal is to people who rarely, if ever, have voted. Many of these are registered Democrats likely to switch their votes in 2016 because of Trump’s particular appeal.
Also, the research Cohn has cited shows that Trump has strong support among Latino-American voters, and certainly among Republican women. And I have seen other election research which shows Trump will do well among black voters. All told, I think the people in this country who regard Trump with strongest disdain are Jewish liberals.
Arnold Harris, Outspeaker
Chinese aircraft carrier arrives in Tartus (Syria). A game changer.
@ ArnoldHarris:
If Trump were the nominee, Cruz would not want the Vice Presidency. If the GOP were to hold the Senate, he wants a place on the Supreme Court.
@ bernard ross:
BR, the anti-Trump party bosses will face the same problem that all 15 of Trump’s nomination process competitors faced. The problem is that all of them want the nomination, and that none of them are likely to cooperate in pulling Trump down for the benefit of some other candidate.
I think this is one case where the will of the voters shall truly prevail. In any case, Trump is the only Republican presidential candidate who appeals to significant numbers of non-Republicans who are fed up with the corrupt politics that has hardened the veins of both political parties.
The fact is, Trump is the only candidate who needs nobody else’s money to run his campaign. And because of that, none of the backroom wire-pullers can make him part of their puppet shows. And all this is a key factor that attracted so many of us to his cause.
Either way, I think the rise of Trump and his candidacy obviously threatens the old guard in both the traditional news media and the traditional political party structures. I think he will win. But even if he loses, the old guard for both the liberals and the conservatives will lose their old powers over the political life of this country.
Arnold Harris, Outspeaker
…there will be open rebellion. The corporate parasites have controlled the party since 1989 and desperately want to retain their positions of privilege, but the natives are belatedly getting restless. A brazen screw job of Trump might have exactly the opposite effect of what the RINOs anticipate. Instead of doing the usual conservative thing by haplessly cursing the fates while throwing a meaningless tantrum, the peasants just might storm the Bastille.
Where did I put my guillotine?
ArnoldHarris Said:
but he cannot switch to an independent ticket after February so they might string him along until after then. Is the candidate selected by the primary voters directly or by the party delegates and officials?
I am surprised that Biden did not run after Hillary’s scandals emerged.
BR:
Cruz isn’t one of those Republicans who parks himself not just in the middle of the political highway, but right on top of the whitestripe divider line. And He has gone out of his way not to pick fights with Trump; Trump’s polling numbers go up; the polling numbers of his attackers go down.
But maybe Cruz’s avoidance of attacking Trump isn’t just because he has seen what happens to those who get nasty with the Donald. There’s also a strong possibility he can see just the way this Republican nomination battle is headed, and assuming he stays locked in second place, would not mind negotiating a vice presidency under Trump. Vice presidents typically have first crack at the presidency, all other things being equal. Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Al Gore, George H W Bush, just counting the last 125 years, used the vice presidency as a sure road to their party’s presidential nomination. And who ever would even have heard about Hillary Rodham Clinton had her husband not been elected president for two terms?
So I think that if Trump keeps his lead as shown in all the polls now, then Cruz will help him jump the 50 percent hurdle when the Republicans run their nominating convention.
Also, I think more than ever that if the GOP backroom bosses and wannabe bosses conspire to steal Trumps nomination, he will do exactly what he threatened a few months ago, and blow apart the Republican Party. The truth is, Trump doesn’t need the Republican Party any more. They need him and they need him a lot more than I need my morning coffee.
As for the other dozen or so GOP losers, most of them will have spent all their remaining campaign money within the next couple of months. And let’s face it; not even the son of one Bush president and the brother of another Bush president will have any more money flowing his way if his ass is firmly anchored in 5 percent city. And after they have gone, the media geeks won’t be wasting their time or travel budget listening to their great ideas about how to keep Donald Trump out of the White House even if the majority of the primary election voters say:
“Fuck you, Mr or Ms Irrelevant Newsmedia, I’m voting for Trump no matter what. So get the hell out of my way.”
Arnold Harris, Outspeaker
add the other 4 and they are all together only 4 points above Trump
I suspect the GOP will find a way to sabotage the non politician outsider who wont play ball with them.
It was forever thus:
@ babushka:
All true, BB. However, Cruz is the candidate of America’s rightwing political Evangelical Christians. Worthy as they are in terms of their overall policies and proven friendship to Israel, they do not command a sufficiency of national political support to get elected to the US presidency. They play well all across the Southern states and certainly in Iowa. But that’s not where most of the voting population lives, and Christian Evangelism, although widespread, has limited political appeal.
Based on these presumptions, I would estimate that Trump will be more likely than Cruz to beat Clinton in the general election. Trump, as a matter of fact, is attracting strong support from people who rarely or never vote, and from blue-collar workers and their unions, and even from the African-American and Latino communities.
I think Trump will take the Republican nomination and will beat Clinton in the general election. However, I think the most interesting personalities besides Trump seeking the nomination are Rand Paul and Mike Huckabee. Both these candidates give evidence of high intellect; which is a human quality that always appeals to me even if I choose not to support them for political office.
Arnold Harris, Outspeaker
Rubio is battling for the discredited interventionist Bush philosophy of invasion and democratization. Cruz favors the Reagan approach of identifying and defeating America’s enemies, but without the constant military adventurism and feckless attempts at civilizing barbarians.
@ Eric R.:
I too like Cruz. But his chances of surpassing Trump grow more marginal with each passing campaign day. One poll showed more or less dead even in In. owa.
But Trump is said to be putting serious money into his Iowa campaign. And his campaign chief in Iowa is the same Republican operative who put Santorum — of all people — into the winner’s seat, I think in 2012.
If Trump wins Iowa, even by small numbers, and takes New Hampshire a week or so later with much bigger numbers, then you can forget about the rest of the campaign, because Trump will steamroll the whole process right through the Republican national convention.
In any case, Cruz and Trump have maintained friendly relations in this campaign, so that one of them could easily pick the other guy for his vice presiential running mate.
Could either or both of them beat Clinton in the general election. I think so.
Arnold Harris, Outspeaker
Remember that Chait (and Kampeas in the article below) are far-left kapos, apologists for Obama and his recent Shoah treaty with Iran.
Cruz’s support of Israel is far in excess of these two Kommunist Kapo Klowns. He is certainly my choice for President.