There’s been some buzz the last couple of days about Ted Cruz’s attacks on Marco Rubio on foreign policy (including by our own Daniel Larison). And, I think not-unrelatedly, it’s been widely noted that Donald Trump is the candidate most-trusted to handle terrorism, and the candidate who has most obviously benefitted from the reaction to the attacks in Paris and elsewhere. Given the details that have already come out regarding the senseless massacre perpetrated in California, and Trump’s recent declaration that the way to defeat ISIS is to kill their families, I would expect the observed political trend only to continue.

But what is that trend?

It’s not toward neoconservative-style hawkishness. That dispensation is being carried forward in an extreme form by Marco Rubio, a man generally described as having foreign policy expertise, but who is more accurately described as having a foreign policy ideology. Rubio is a kind of crusader for global Americanism, a believer that our foreign policy should consist of championing the right (as we see it) and opposing anyone who doesn’t line up behind us, and always doubling down on our commitments. The true insanity of this ideology in practice is manifest in his recent piece on how to defeat ISIS, which calls for first defeating ISIS’s strongest opponents, Russia, Iran and the Assad regime, so that the deck can be cleared for America to battle ISIS without accidentally siding with anyone who hasn’t already won an American commitment to their defense.

I don’t get the sense that this particular approach to foreign policy is winning any significant number of adherents. And anyway, Hillary Clinton offers a less-extreme, more seasoned and more rational version of the same ideology, something I suspect the sorts of people most likely to be inclined to reward Rubio for his foreign policy are at least dimly aware of. Rather, I suspect Rubio’s main gains are coming from more centrist, establishment-minded Republicans starting to coalesce around the only establishment-acceptable figure getting any traction – and I suspect most of these are not really motivated by his specific foreign policy views, or are even aware of just how extreme his views on that subject are.

The rising dispensation, though, isn’t un-hawkish. It isn’t realist, it isn’t restrained, and it certainly isn’t dovish. But it is different from Rubio’s full-spectrum interventionism. What is it?

I think the right label, for both Cruz and Trump, is “To Hell With Them Hawk,” a coinage invented by John Derbyshire back in 2006. That’s a bit cumbersome as labels go, but we need one, and I think this one will do, because it expresses the degree to which the defining aspect of the rising hawkish dispensation is not really caring what happens as a result of American actions, provided those actions are plainly aimed at killing our opponents.

Trump wins applause for saying we should cheer Russia on for attacking ISIS rather than getting in their way or trying to take over. But he also wins applause for saying we should seize ISIS’s oil and kill their families. There are common threads between the more restrained and the extremely aggressive stances: in both cases, we’re talking about somebody attacking ISIS, and in neither case is there any real concern for a strategic endgame.

Cruz puts a bit more of a realist veneer on his views, but they aren’t so different. He is skeptical of democracy-promotion and nation-building. He thinks we should have left Qaddafi alone and continued to back Mubarak. But he also favors a very hard line on Iran, as well as a hard line on China and Russia. He’s skeptical of some interventions, but he’s also manifestly uninterested in diplomatic solutions to problems.

Rubio is interested in demonstrating that America can lead. The rising dispensation on the right is interesting in demonstrating that American can win – and that it doesn’t really care who else has to lose in the process.