Ted Cruz's muddled foreign policy

Cruz is open about his willingness to traffic with another rogue regime that the current administration has engaged—Bashar al-Assad’s Syria. Cruz misleadingly argues that his Syria policy is similar to Israel’s: “I would note that my view that we don’t have a side in the Syrian civil war is shared by at least one other world leader with a clear eye and a direct vision of what’s happening,” said Cruz, “Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu.”

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But this is not Israel’s policy. Since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, senior Israeli officials, including Netanyahu, have been quite clear that Assad should go. Israel’s operations in Syria have all been directed against Assad’s partners in the Iranian axis, including Iranian arms convoys headed to Hezbollah and weapons depots throughout Syria. Moreover, Israel is quietly cooperating with various anti-Assad rebel groups in order to keep Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps and Hezbollah units from opening another front on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights.

To the extent it seems that Netanyahu has changed his tune over the last several months and now says that Israel has no dog in this fight, the reason for that is Russia’s recent escalation. To state openly that Israel wants Assad gone, the IRGC and Hezbollah vanquished, is to take a public position against Vladimir Putin. So why would the Texas senator follow Netanyahu’s lead here? Are there Russian troops in Oklahoma? Israel is a country with some 6 million Jews that is loathed by nearly every country in the Middle East and has to play its hand very carefully. Cruz wants to become the commander-in-chief of a superpower that determines which way the world turns. The United States is supposed to take sides.

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In fact, Cruz is not taking his lead on Syria from Israel. Like Obama, he is simply using Jerusalem as cover.

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