One underappreciated element of Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign—which has recently come in for a great deal of praise by savvy operators on both sides of the aisle and in the press—are his quiet but effective acts of triangulation.

The Texas senator’s self-image is premised on his uncompromising, unyielding, principled conservatism. That’s a bit of a fiction—back in the 2000s, Cruz was a George W. Bush-adoring “compassionate conservative”—but it’s a carefully constructed one, bolstered through fauxlibusters over Obamacare and the blithe contravention of his party’s leadership. And it has worked: Whoever Donald Trump and Ben Carson might appeal to, polls generally show Cruz leading among Republican voters who identify as “very conservative.”…

As Kapur writes, Cruz is setting up his own position “as a third way between the stalwart, non-interventionist views of Senator Rand Paul and pro-interventionist policies in pursuit of spreading democracy and human rights through the Middle East that [Senator Marco] Rubio espouses.” How different is Cruz’s position here than Paul’s? It seems like more of a matter of emphasis than substance. Here’s what Paul said during the Fox Business Channel debate: