SPENGLER LOOKS AT TED CRUZ’S FOREIGN POLICY:

What makes Cruz so hated is simply that he is smart enough to do without the Establishment. Cruz likes to compare himself to Reagan, whose autodicactic education in foreign policy gave him independence of judgment and confidence to pursue victory in the Cold War when the Establishment of his day thought it impossible. In many ways, Cruz will have a bigger problem if elected: for a decade prior to Reagan’s victory, the neo-conservatives (led by their “godfather” Irving Kristol) had trained cadre, ground out academic articles, and sparred over the big themes in the op-ed columns of the major media. Today the pickings are much slimmer. It’s not so much that the emperor has no clothes, but that the empire has no tailors.

Cruz, if elected, will have to do his own thinking, to an extent that no American president has had to do since Lincoln. He is intelligent enough and arrogant enough to do that, and he will owe no favors or patronage to the Establishment. He would be the cleverest man to occupy the oval office in a century and a half. He carries no baggage from the Bush administration, and will not invite the Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol or Fox News’ Charles Krauthammer to draft an inaugural address, as did Bush in 2004. He won the Iowa caucuses by building the strongest grass-roots network in the country (he claims to have a campaign chairman in every county of the United States), which makes him independent of the party apparatus, such as it is.

Endearing, boyish, photogenic and eloquent, Marco Rubio is the candidate that Central Casting sent the Establishment from the studio pool. Rubio, a middling student at university and a Florida machine politician throughout his career, says his lines well but does not have an original thought about foreign policy. That is why the Establishment likes him. Cruz knows that the Establishment is naked, and is willing to say so. That’s why they don’t like him. They aren’t supposed to. They look at him the way a rice bowl looks at a hammer.

Cruz is not (as the Establishment punditeska suggests) a “Jacksonian” isolationist in the sense of Walter Russell Meade’s use of the term; rather, he is a John Quincy Adams realist in Angelo Codevilla‘s reading. Cruz feels no ideological compulsion to assert America’s world mastery. He is concerned about American security and American power. The Establishment came into being in America’s brief moment at the head of a unipolar world, and is imprinted with that notion the way ducklings are imprinted with the image of their mothers. The world has changed.

It certainly has.