John Allen Gay comments on Ted Cruz’s recent remarks on foreign policy. He notes Cruz’s interest in Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s “Dictatorships and Double Standards” essay, and finds that he isn’t really following Kirkpatrick’s recommendations:

Cruz does not hold to these conservative ideals in practice. He has, for example, been a leading voice in favor of freezing the Iran nuclear talks, in part on human-rights grounds. How different from the “simplistic version” of human rights in foreign policy is his proclamation that “there should be no further discussion while [Americans held in Iran] are languishing in prison,” or his complaint that “some in the Obama administration believe human rights issues can be compartmentalized, or rather marginalized, in their quest to get a comprehensive deal on Iran’s nuclear program”?

Cruz has suggested that another precondition on the Iran talks should have been an Iranian affirmation of “Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.” There is not even a hint of pragmatism in that, for it would be holding Iran to a standard to which we do not even hold our Arab allies, who “expressed full rejection” of this formulation in the declaration of the Arab League summit this March. We still arm them and even base troops on their territory, yet we cannot even talk with Iran?

As Gay observes, the key differences between the world Kirkpatrick was writing about and the one Cruz sees are that the Cold War is over and the USSR is no more. Kirkpatrick’s case for treating cooperative authoritarian regimes differently from hostile totalitarian ones still contains some useful insights, but as general guidance for U.S. policy it is obviously outdated. Her criticism of specific Carter-era policies over three decades ago may have made sense in the context of the rivalry with the Soviets, but now Cruz seems to be interested in using the essay as a way to give a free pass to authoritarian U.S. clients when there is no particular reason to do so. While Kirkpatrick saw the end of the Cold War as an opportunity for America to return to being a “normal country,” Cruz is unfortunately all too typical of contemporary Republican hawks in that he wants to reproduce policies and ideas that haven’t been relevant for more than twenty years and rely on arguments that have little or no bearing on the contemporary world.

The closer that Cruz gets to our own time and has to answer questions about more controversial topics, he surprisingly has little to say:

Cruz was less direct when asked about the 2003 Iraq war. He could not bring himself to say that he would have opposed the invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein.

“I did not have access to intelligence reports to review what we knew about Saddam Hussein’s potential development of WMD or anything else,” he said. “I do know that among those who reviewed the intelligence there was consensus that it posed a material threat. Not having reviewed that intelligence, I will refrain from offering an opinion.”

When forced to take a position on one of the most significant foreign policy decisions of the last thirty years, Cruz avoids giving a straight answer one way or the other. This the sort of ridiculous hedging that his neither-a-McCain-nor-a-Paul-be stance inevitably leads to, which amounts to dodging the question with a lame excuse. Cruz might think that this keeps his options open and doesn’t identify him with either side of the Iraq war debate, but it just gives supporters and opponents of the war reason to distrust him.