LOL, I have no idea what that is supposed to mean.
Posted on 05/16/2015 10:20:36 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Ted Cruz is intellectually arrogant, like Ronald Reagan. The difference is that Reagan masked his arrogance with self-deprecating humor. Sen. Cruz does a Reagan impression that would do a nightclub comedian proud, but he doesn’t have Reagan’s easy and spontaneous humor.
One doesn’t think of Reagan as arrogant, but he was in fact the most arrogant leader we have had since Lincoln. He ignored the whole of the foreign policy establishment in his conviction that America stood to win the Cold War and bring down Communism. Then as now, the foreign policy establishment resembled Jonathan Swift’s scientists on the floating island of Laputa, treading perilously close to the edge with noses in the air.
Sen. Cruz is authentically bright, sufficiently so for the liberal Alan Dershowitz to declare that he was the best student he had ever had at Harvard’s Law School. The conservative legal theorist Robert P. George, who taught Cruz at Princeton, says the same thing. He’s so smart that he is not the least impressed by the conservative foreign policy establishment.
That’s what qualifies Ted Cruz for the presidency. Among the Republican candidates, Cruz is the only one to state plainly that we stayed too long in Iraq and erred in trying to turn it into Switzerland. (I exclude Rand Paul, who is a dumb rube isolationist of the old school and unqualified for national office). Contrast this to Jeb Bush, who thinks we didn’t stay long enough. Cruz still has some things to learn, to be sure. Sending arms to Ukraine, as he proposes, is pointless. Russian leader Vladimir Putin wants to keep Ukraine in civil war indefinitely, and will match whatever we send in order to do so. Putin wants revenge for the West’s effort to break Ukraine out of the Russian sphere, and leaving the West with a bloody, bankrupt, ungovernable mess on its doorstep is his best move. As Prof. Angelo Codevilla told a Claremont Institute gathering last October, the way to frustrate Putin is to let him keep the Russian-majority Eastern Ukraine, a rust-bucket and money pit of no value to the West; the Western part of Ukraine would then be Catholic and pro-Western.
Sixteen years of George W. Bush and Barack Obama will leave the next president with a different world: a new Sino-Russian entente directed against theUS, and chaos in most of the Middle East. Both are the consequence of foreign policy utopianism. We destroyed the century-long balance of power in Iraq and Syria by forcing majority rule in Iraq, and stood godfather to a perpetual Sunni-Shi’ite civil war. We tried to flip Ukraine to the West, and Putin allied with China. We have scored nothing but own-goals. We are spending a trillion and a half dollar on the Edsel of the air, the F-35, and have allowed China to narrow the technology gap that once made the United States the dominant superpower.
The foreign policy establishment of both parties agrees that it is America’s mission to remake the world in its own image, although the liberal Wilsonian and the neo-conservative Republican versions of this utopia have minor differences. We need a president arrogant enough to ignore the whole pack of them, just like Reagan did. That requires arrogance more than any other quality.
Things looked bad when Ronald Reagan came into office. Most of the intellectual elite in Europe as well as the US thought that Russia would win the Cold War. Of course, Reagan had one gigantic advantage: the US was the only venue in the world where an entrepreneur could raise money for disruptive new technologies. The talent of the world came to America, while Russia and China remained paralyzed by Communism and Europe remained moribund. That’s not true today: China and other Asian countries are innovating, in some cases faster than we are. If you don’t believe me, visit the Science Park in Shenzhen where Tencent and other Chinese computer firms have facilities. The next president will have a much tougher mission. Sen. Cruz is the only candidate I who is tough, smart and arrogant enough to do the job.
Marco Rubio is a bright and personable young man with an attractive message, but he is callow enough to think that Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer are foreign policy sages. Rubio speaks eloquently of his support for Israel, but a great deal of what he proposes will damage Israeli interests. For the past ten years, Russia has told us that it would hurt us in Iran in retaliation for Western efforts to get control of Ukraine. Russia is threatening to give Iran sophisticated air-defense systems; if it wants to, Russia can create a huge amount of trouble for us in Iran. America’s stupidity in Ukraine turns Israel into collateral damage; every Israeli I know thinks that American policy toward Ukraine is crazy.
Scott Walker is a terrific governor and an attractive candidate, but he has no foreign policy experience–unlike Reagan, who did a weekly foreign policy radio broadcast for a decade, and did his own research. Walker could persuade me that he knows what he’s doing, but I haven’t heard much from him yet. Foreign policy is too important for the next administration for us to elect a president who needs on-the-job training.
Here, I’ll answer my own question:
CRUZ: I think we stayed too long and we got far too involved in nation-building. It is not our job to turn foreign nations into — we shouldn’t be trying to turn Iraq into Switzerland. What we should be doing if there are people who pose a clear and present danger to our national security, and I believe ISIS qualifies as that, then the objective should be taking out that threat.
Precious little to go on there. Kind of a throw-away line. And BTW, this bit — “What we should be doing if there are people who pose a clear and present danger to our national security, and I believe ISIS qualifies as that, then the objective should be taking out that threat” — that’s exactly what George W Bush thought he was doing, taking out a clear-and-present-danger threat.
I like Ted Cruz, but this article goes way too far in calling him a foreign policy genius. Sounds to me like he’s groping for solutions in a very tough world, just like many other highly patriotic Americans (which Cruz is one of) are doing.
As for Reagan, he wasn’t just a genius, he had HUGE qualifications in 1980, qualifications that aren’t matched by any candidate today in any party. That’s just a fact, and not a criticism of Cruz.
Be honest. Walker has been all over the map with immigration and other larger than the state issues.
Did I post that on this silly thread??
The author was saying the complete opposite.
He is ruling out Walker and claiming Cruz has some great executive experience heads up over Walker with his long <2+1/2 years of Senate experience. .
He made a stupid argument.
Makes me want him all the more. Decent article.
Be honest, this thread's author's argument is doo-doo.
Ted Cruz is a man who knows who he is and knows where he’s going. He wants America’s proper role in the world restored. Mr. Cruz understands we must once again be the land of the free; home of the brave. This is arrogance?
What would David Goldman have as Ted Cruz to be - ‘humble’ like Jimmy Carter?
I notice that Alan Dershowitz says that Mr. Cruz was the best student he had ever had at Harvard’s Law School. Just wondering - what did the faculty think of the current POTUS and FLOTUS, who supposedly attended?
Ted Cruz does have executive and leadership experience. Should we list it again?
Having convictions is not the same as being arrogant. Reagan’s beliefs were in free markets, freedom, less government, transferring power to people and not government agencies, and a foreign policy that reinvigorated containment of communism. Those were not arrogant assumptions; they were the ideals the West had strayed from since the rise of War Socialism and the Welfare State. To those who were of the opposite conviction Reagan might indeed seem arrogant, but not to those who understand the principles underpinning his values.
Yes to the first, no to the second - really, the Sunni-Shi'ite civil war is a thousand years and more older than the United States. It would be arrogance indeed to claim a dominant piece of that toxic lineage.
Intelligence alone - and Cruz has it in spades - is insufficient to formulate a coherent policy in this most chaotic environment in, perhaps, the world. A good deal of dispassionate learning that 0bama, despite the time he's been given, has never deigned to explore will make the difference. Here the Hippocratic "first, do no harm" may well be in order.
One cannot fault Bush or what have been grossly oversimplified as "the neocons" for coming up with a grand Wilsonian plan to democratize this septic pit of longstanding hatred: despite the narrative, Bush's was essentially a reactive policy and nation-building an afterthought. It came closer to success than I ever thought that it would. But it wasn't really a part of any overarching plan, and what we now have before us is an indication that the plan, had it even ever solidified, would have failed in any case.
That does not excuse the absolute horror 0bama's malign neglect has made out of what was at best a fragile stasis, but a stasis nonetheless. What we have in ISIS and the Iranian proxies is no more than a continuation of what began with a fellow named Ali starting in the year 632. Lest we consider this an even fight, we must remember that the Shi'ites are, at best, a significant minority of the overall Muslim worldwide population, punching well out of their weight class by virtue of state level support from Iran. The Sunni as a minority control over a Shi'ite population in Iraq is a bit of an anomaly, based more on the Arab/Persian ethnic struggle than religion per se. But it's there, and if ISIS seems disproportionately powerful in all this it is, in fact, a well-funded tribal reaction to Shi'ite/Persian hegemony in a Sunni/Arab land.
In short, it's a mess, and our involvement should probably focus more on keeping Russia, China, and other interested parties from undue influence than trying to re-establish what seems, in retrospect, undue influence of our own. We're done with that, we got what we wanted (stability in the international oil economy) and if we're going to involve ourselves further it would be very nice to consider before we commit what the hell we're really after.
I support the fight to penetrate into the heart of the Muslim world.
But I will wait for the nuances of Cruz to unfold during the next year.
Cruz is sharp as a whip, and he knows to not engage in arguments about every action and decision that is in the past, and not his own.
Don’t let them drag you down into eternal arguments about the past.
You mean the highlight of his 2+1/2 years being that failed two week government shutdown in 2013?
I remember his ‘don't blink’ commercials run on FNC and even MSNBC claiming a shutdown would make Obama blink and repeal Obamacare.
Reagan like Walker had a record of BEATING Dems, not losing every fight with them.
Perhaps you’re right about not getting too bogged down in past decisions of Bush, though it’s certainly appropriate for Republican contenders to get into past decisions of Obama, especially his decision to turn victory into defeat in Iraq (though maybe even that is dangerous territory, I’ll grant you, since no one wants to be perceived as advocating another big incursion into Iraq).
But to be fair, we are commenting here on an article and the article itself brought up the point.
It also brings up the comparison between Cruz and Reagan. I just don’t think it’s a good comparison. Reagan was governor of California and a key player in national politics going back at least 20 years before he became president in 1980.
Nice Democratic talking points, dude. You should write for Rachel Maddow or Joe Biden...
I would compare Cruz’s conservatism to Reagan’s.
Walker is darn good in many ways, but he is not the Reagan like figure of Ted Cruz.
LOL, I have no idea what that is supposed to mean.
Who compares to Reagan?
Well, in my mind, Palin and Cruz do.
Only one of them was a Governor, but my interest is in their essence, who they are in their hearts and how they apply their incredible personalities and political skills, and what they desire for our nation and humanity.
Oh my Lord! Braveheart? That’s almost as bad as a certain lady here who seems to think that Scott Walker was born either in a manger or a log cabin. What was her name again?
Damn!
LOL
He's the only one that I want as my President.
You are a character, is the moon full or something similar?
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