Bret Stephens is the latest to join in the denunciations of Cruz for being insufficiently aggressive in his foreign policy, but the attack attack shows why Cruz doesn’t have to worry:

The truth about Syria isn’t that we have no dog in the fight. It’s that we’ve got to fight two dogs.

The idea that the U.S. has to fight both sides of a civil war is why many Republicans and most Americans continue to recoil from the sort of reflexive interventionism that Cruz is criticizing. Even if the Syria hawks’ argument made any sense (it doesn’t), most Americans look at a foreign civil war between an awful regime and monstrous jihadist groups and reasonably conclude that this isn’t a fight that the U.S. needs to have. Syria hawks look at an intractable conflict where the U.S. has nothing at stake and reach the opposite conclusion. It is not a coincidence that there has never been strong public support for siding with anti-regime forces in Syria. To the extent that the public thinks the U.S. has anything at stake in the conflict, they don’t think it has anything to do with toppling the regime. That is one reason why there was overwhelming resistance to attacking the Syrian government in 2013 and very little to bombing ISIS in 2014.

Cruz can’t and won’t make a case for staying out of the war in Syria entirely, and his ideas for the war on ISIS are lousy, but he isn’t so daft as to insist that the U.S. has to be enemies with both the regime and ISIS at the same time. The truth is that the U.S. doesn’t have to fight either of them, but has foolishly stumbled into opposing both. As atrocious and wrong as some of Cruz’s ideas are, he gets the better of the argument with neoconservatives and other Syria hawks by focusing on the side that poses a threat to U.S. allies. Stephens keeps giving Cruz a backhanded compliment that he is too smart not to “know” the things that Stephens asserts, but in this case Cruz is actually demonstrating that he is at least a little smarter than the ideologues that want the U.S. to fight both sides of a civil war at once.