Senator Ted Cruz will visit the Heritage Foundation Thursday to deliver a blistering attack on the Obama administration’s handling of jihadist terror and the region that produces it.
The Obama administration ignores “the reality that our nation is under attack,” Cruz will say, according to an early draft of the speech obtained by THE WEEKLY STANDARD. “Americans no longer feel safe in their schools, workplaces, and cities. This should not be new standard.”
The speech comes as the threat from radical Islam has dominated headlines and the presidential campaign for weeks, following attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, California. Recent polling shows terrorism and national security among the top concerns of Republican primary voters and several candidates have used the moment to offer proposals to change course from the Obama administration’s passive approach.
Cruz points to Obama’s address to the nation on ISIS last Sunday as an example of his fecklessness. The president reported that he knows the enemy well because he sees the threat in his daily intelligence briefing. But seeing it isn’t good enough, Cruz will say, because Obama has “chosen to not to deal with the reality” and “has chosen not to confront the actual enemy.”
Cruz says Obama is not only afraid to call the jihadist threat by its name – “radical Islamic terrorism” – he spent “a significant portion of his Sunday address as an apologist for Islam.” The administration encourages the kind of political correctness that kept neighbors of Tashfeen Malik and Syed Farook, the San Bernardino attackers, from reporting their suspicious activities.
Cruz has been engaged in a fierce battle over national security issues with Senator Marco Rubio and has gone out of his way to maintain the delicate non-aggression pact he has with showman-provocateur Donald Trump. And while Cruz doesn’t mention either of his chief rivals directly in his address, he escalates his fight with Rubio over surveillance and offers a more sophisticated version of Trump’s offensive ban-all-Muslims scheme.
Cruz laments “some on the right” who want to reestablish the National Security Agency’s bulk data collection program created under section 215 of the Patriot Act. He argues that the program was intrusive, extra-Constitutional, cumbersome and ineffective. “More data is not better data,” Cruz says, defending his vote for the USA Freedom Act, the legislation that ended the bulk collection. Proponents of the broader collection favor “sweeping aside citizens’ Fourth Amendment rights,” he says.
Intelligence officials are divided on the extent to which limiting the data collection will harm national security. In my conversations with current and former intelligence officials, the reactions have ranged from “no big deal” to “we’ll see” to something closer to panic about incomplete networks and missed connections. Given his harsh critique of the Obama administration throughout the speech, Cruz may raise some eyebrows by citing oft-criticized Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to bolster his claims that the USA Freedom Act has improved U.S. intelligence capabilities.
Cruz says nothing about Trump’s now-modified proposals to ban all Muslims from entering the United States. But the first component of his plan to keep Americans safe is to secure its borders and he prominently mentions legislation he has proposed to freeze the refugee program “for those coming from terrorist-ridden countries,” particularly Syria. Cruz makes a hard-headed argument that while Americans are kind-hearted, this generosity cannot come at the expense of our security.
Cruz doesn’t break much new ground on his military plan to confront ISIS and jihadists, arguing that the while he’s open to some U.S. boots on the ground – “some small number of U.S. special operations forces on the ground,” he says – most of the ground troops will have to come from U.S. allies in the region – among them, Kurds, Jordanians and Egyptians.
It won’t make many headlines, but perhaps the most interesting part of Cruz’s speech is the lengthy explication of his view of America’s role in the world that ends it. Cruz has long sought to position himself as something of a compromise between Rand Paul style non-interventionists and John McCain-style internationalists (whom Cruz recently described as “aggressive Washington neocons.”) Over his short tenure in the Senate, he has at times sounded a lot like his friend from Kentucky and at others like the senator who once dismissed him as a “wacko bird.”
In his Heritage speech, Cruz portrays himself as the new avatar of a realist neo-Reaganite foreign policy by citing Jeane Kirkpatrick’s famous Commentary essay “Dictatorships and Double Standards.” From Cruz’s remarks:
Every Republican presidential candidate picks and chooses from Reagan’s presidency to boost his or her candidacy. And while Cruz’s depiction of Reagan’s approach to the world is perhaps somewhat selective in the current Republican primary, it may also prove popular.
