With President Trump’s Cabinet (and sometimes the president himself) internally divided on key issues, lawmakers should recover their function as a “stabilizing force” on American foreign policy, one prominent Republican lawmaker is urging.
“These debates will continue to rage on,” Texas Sen. Ted Cruz predicted to the Washington Examiner.
The interview took place following his speech Wednesday on “the Senate’s role in foreign policy” at the American Enterprise Institute. Trump’s impulsive hostility to the foreign policy establishment consensus has rattled decision-makers around the world, but Cruz argued this moment offers an “opportunity to set right generations of confusion we have inherited from both parties.”
“Those who came here today expecting a forceful rebuke of the current administration might be disappointed,” Cruz said in his public address, though his admission that his party currently has a “critical responsibility” to develop a “strong, just, and intelligent foreign policy” might be taken as a subtle rebuke. “But with its relentless focus on American greatness, concern for the wishes of regular American families, and skepticism of military intervention, the Trump administration is primed to be a great incubator for a national-interest-based foreign policy if it has the right leaders, mentors, advisers, and friends.”
Cruz might never be a friend of the president: After Trump won a nasty and personal primary battle, Cruz famously refused to endorse the nominee at the GOP convention in 2016. But at AEI, he laid out an argument that could solidify his position in one of the other camps.
“Call me a noninterventionist hawk,” he declared. Rejecting the “binary choice” between interventionism and isolationism — “as if our only choices are to bomb the world into democracy or ignore the world into peace” — Cruz had strong words for his colleagues on both sides of that divide: “Some have never met a country they didn’t want to invade. Others have never met a theater they didn’t want to abandon.” Of the 17 Republican presidential hopefuls in 2016, Cruz said all but two lived “comfortably” within the interventionist-isolationist dichotomy: Trump and himself.
Cruz argued for a “third option” that divides the world into four “baskets that our country should handle differently”: friends, enemies, rivals, and “problematic allies.” (Cruz puts Saudi Arabia in that last category.) Those relationships should be managed, he said, through a judicious application of diplomatic, economic, and (as a last resort) military power.
“As I have said, a national-interest foreign policy is not some strange middle point between intervention and isolation. Because it does not exist on the same axis,” he told AEI. “It is not a cookie cutter that prescribes the same action to every situation, but it’s a pragmatic standard of judgment, under which some situations merit force, some the soft touch of diplomacy, and some no involvement at all.”
In short, Cruz proposed a foreign policy governed by the virtue of prudence at a time when the Oval Office is occupied by a president widely regarded as imprudent.
“This administration’s focus, and the president’s focus, on American greatness has naturally led it to be receptive to arguments from national interest, which I believe should be the defining criterion for our foreign policy,” Cruz told the Washington Examiner after the speech. “That doesn’t mean that the administration’s continued focus on national interest is a foregone conclusion.”
He gave two examples: Trump moving the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and withdrawing from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.
“Both decisions were hotly contested within the administration, and indeed multiple senior cabinet administrations opposed both decisions,” Cruz said. The Texas lawmaker was one of the senators (along with Arkansas’ Tom Cotton and Florida’s Marco Rubio) who lobbied Trump to ignore other advisers and make what turned out to be signature policy moves in the Middle East. He believes both were “the right decisions for American national security interests” but doesn’t expect future debates inside the administration to be settled any more easily or even on that same “national interest” basis. Cruz perceives that lawmakers can influence White House policy debates if they use Trump’s desire to “make America great again” to sell their ideas. But it will take deft engagement with the administration, because the president’s vision isn’t specific and his team isn’t unified around it. Two Trump hires within the White House could help Cruz make his case: Victoria Coates, a Cruz adviser in the 2016 campaign, is on the National Security Council, and John Bolton, whom Cruz consulted before the campaign, is the national security adviser.
Cruz didn’t end up in the White House himself, as he’d hoped, and he’s now seeking to exercise an influence that the Senate, he argued Wednesday, has allowed to atrophy. “We have seen 20 years of foreign policy varying widely in goals and outcomes, strategies, and executions, seemingly without continuity from one administration to the next,” he told AEI. “And often, without any sense of continuity even within an administration. And that is where we will continue to find ourselves, with the pendulum of our foreign policy swinging unpredictably, without the strong stabilizing role of the Senate.” Under Trump, Cruz implied carefully in the interview, senators can use their office as a platform for public and private diplomacy with the administration to rehabilitate American foreign policy after two decades of fruitless feuding between and within the parties.
Cruz isn’t the only Republican senator who ran for president before he even completed his first term; Rubio and Kentucky’s Rand Paul were also 2016 contenders. The rush for the Senate exits by Tea Party icons was a paradoxical sprint for a limited-government movement that prided itself on respect for congressional authority: the Article One branch of government, as Utah Sen. Mike Lee (the Tea Party’s Ringo, who did not run) emphasized in the lead-up to 2016.
“There’s an old joke: How do you make 100 senators turn their heads? You just call out ‘Mr. President,'” Cruz told the Washington Examiner. “That’s not new. That’s not limited to Republicans and Democrats. That’s not limited to the 21st century. I also think there’s a long history of senators who have run for president, come up short, and returned to the Senate to become far more effective leaders.”
Cruz is refining his plan to do just that. This year, he moved a committee assignment from Armed Services to Foreign Relations. His new role gives him jurisdiction over the State Department rather than the Pentagon, with greater opportunities for public advocacy than the private deliberations over military funding allow. And he seems to be taking care to maintain his relationships with the administration while avoiding the trap of abject loyalty.
“In the course of this administration, I have been offered multiple opportunities to consider different roles and I have consistently said ‘No’ because the Senate is the battlefield,” Cruz revealed. “I am very much enjoying being, as Teddy Roosevelt put it, ‘in the arena,’ being on the battlefield of ideas and able to fight for the principles of freedom and the Constitution that I hold so dear.”
If the roles Cruz played in the administration’s decisions on the Iran deal and the Israeli embassy are any guide, some of those battles will play out within the halls of his former rival’s White House.
