Ted Cruz, Two; Marco Rubio, One—Scoring Their First Debate
His Republican opponents can’t get to the right of Trump on any of these issues—and they can’t constructively debate him—because he has barely thought through the details. This drives other Republicans crazy, in the same way that Ronald Reagan’s seemingly fanciful call for a Strategic Defense Initiative—dubbed “Star Wars” in the press—drove his opponents crazy.
.. Since arriving in the Senate, in 2011, Rubio has gradually become one of the most hawkish members of the Republican Party. His policies now align closely with the chamber’s leading Wilsonians, Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who have long argued that the United States should spread democracy in the Middle East, sometimes at the barrel of a gun
.. While Rubio is an uber-hawk, Cruz is now his party’s leading skeptic of American interventions; he’s not as firm as Rand Paul, but he’s become much more prominent. On Tuesday, Cruz outlined in some detail his case against the interventionism of the Rubio-McCain-Graham wing, saying that Egypt and Libya were better off with the secular dictators that previously ruled those countries, and—more surprisingly—that Bashar al-Assad, who is responsible for hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, should remain in power. “If we topple Assad, the result will be ISIS will take over Syria, and it will worsen U.S. national security interests,” he said. “Instead of being a Woodrow Wilson democracy promoter, we ought to hunt down our enemies and kill ISIS rather than creating opportunities for ISIS to take control of new countries.”