It Took Fox Business to Host a Serious Foreign Policy Debate

Matt Purple

Politics, Americas

Paul shone, Cruz had presence, and Rubio has some brushing up to do

When the National Interest asked me to write a piece about last night’s presidential debate, I considered sending over something wholly unrelated to the topic at hand—my mother’s chowder recipe, an unnecessarily strident polemic against Rutherford B. Hayes, a 15,000-word critical analysis of a Boxcar Children novel. Anything to avoid watching another meeting of the Republican candidates. What could they possibly say that wasn’t said, you know, two weeks ago?

I was happy to be proven wrong. Last night was supposed to be about economics, hosted as it was by the stock hawks at Fox Business. But the most fascinating exchanges ended up focusing on foreign policy.

It began when Senator Rand Paul criticized Senator Marco Rubio for supporting a trillion dollars in new military expenditures. Rubio then switched on the autopilot and called Paul a “committed isolationist.” This elicited a laugh from Paul, who continued to press Rubio on how new Pentagon spending that wasn’t paid for could be considered fiscally conservative. Rubio declared that he wanted America to be “the strongest military power in the world.” He won on sizzle, but Paul won on substance.

Ted Cruz then interjected with a middle ground: “You can do that and pay for it. You can do that and also be fiscally responsible.” Cruz has long tried to stake out a waypoint between Paul-style realism and Rubio-style neoconservatism, even when it’s sheathed in fog. He’s also been making a transparent play for Paul’s libertarian-leaning voter base ever since the Kentucky senator started lagging in the polls. Paul probably fended him off last night, but the combative Cruz made his presence felt. He had a good debate.

Foreign policy came up again in the form of Vladimir Putin, with Donald Trump touting the benefits of haggling with Russia. But then he made a surprisingly cogent case for staying neutral in the Syrian Civil War: “Assad is a bad guy. But we have no idea who the so-called rebels…nobody knows who they are.” This set up an unlikely tag team between the nationalist Trump and the libertarian Paul, as the latter called arming the Syrian rebels “the dumbest, most foolhardy notion” and correctly pointed out that the other candidates’ lazy endorsement of a Syrian no-fly zone would mean shooting down Russian planes. Then they both lashed out at Carly Fiorina for interrupting so much.