Angelo Codevilla tries to define a “Tea Party” foreign policy:

By contrast, Tea Party Americans, hearkening as they do to statesmen from George Washington to Theodore Roosevelt, the men on Mount Rushmore, as well as to Ronald Reagan see America’s greatness as that of the “city on a hill,” which keeps itself exceptional to mankind’s corruption, whose example may or may not inspire others to follow. Hence a Tea Party president would be more reluctant than a Republican to make foreign commitments.

There is no evidence that the politicians he cites as representatives of such “Tea Party” views are interested in avoiding new foreign commitments. Codevilla mentions Mike Pence and Ted Cruz specifically, and neither of them would seem to be any more reluctant than their fellow Republicans to support new foreign interventions. In fact, most of those identifying with the Tea Party tend to be more intensely hawkish than others on the right. Most of those that identify with the Tea Party are among the most hawkish of Americans. They are also more likely to have an inflated view of foreign threats. To the extent that Cruz, Pence, et al. share these views, they would seem to be more likely to overreact to perceived threats and be more likely to commit the U.S. to new conflicts. One thing that might distinguish them from conventional hawks is that they claim to be opposed to “nation-building,” but that doesn’t make them any less supportive of unnecessary military interventions. If anything, they are probably in favor of taking military action more often as long as it doesn’t turn into a prolonged “nation-building” exercise.

It may be correct to attribute “Tea Party” attitudes to Cruz and Pence, but it’s not as if they don’t already have recorded statements and votes that we can use to make sense of their views. In Pence’s case, he voted for the 2002 Iraq war authorization while in Congress, and his voting record on Iraq in the years that followed doesn’t fit the picture of someone opposed to costly, open-ended wars. Cruz claimed to be a skeptic of bombing Syria, but also suggested that the U.S. send its forces into Syria to seize the regime’s chemical weapons, which would have been a much larger, costlier, more dangerous undertaking. If this is the “Tea Party” foreign policy we can expect from either of them, it is no more appealing than any other type of hawkish foreign policy on offer.