Given that Cruz believes America has “receded from the world stage” and is “increasingly viewed as irrelevant” under the Obama administration, which has pursued “a photo-op foreign policy of a bomb here and a missile there” rather than trying to defeat ISIS, you might expect that Cruz is promising a dramatically more aggressive policy to defeat the group. But the Cruz plan for taking on ISIS doesn’t differ dramatically from the airstrikes plus proxy war strategy the Obama administration is already pursuing to decidedly mixed effect.

Cruz made a point of saying the U.S. arm Kurdish peshmerga forces directly rather than worry about offending Baghdad, which the administration has probably been doing covertly to some extent for a while and may do more overtly soon. He also called for doing more to support the militaries of Jordan and Egypt, both of which are already fighting ISIS and are among the top five recipients of U.S. military aid. While he continued to criticize the Obama administration for pushing for the removal of Bashar al-Assad in the absence of a non-jihadist alternative, Cruz, like rival Marco Rubio, punted on the question of whether he would send in large numbers of U.S. ground troops to fight ISIS. This is the one major area where some members of his party have a substantive disagreement with the Obama administration, but not Cruz. He criticized rivals who tout ground troops as a “talismanic demonstration of military strength.”