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 the US, 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.