Ted Cruz Stumbles Again on Foreign Policy

Matthew Kroenig

Politics, Americas

On North Korea's nuclear threat, the senator misses the mark.

It is becoming increasingly clear that foreign policy is not Ted Cruz’s strong suit. From his incomplete thoughts about using “carpet bombing” to defeat ISIS, to his gross misapplication of the late Jeane Kirkpatrick’s writings to justify his proposed policy of leaving in power Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, Cruz’s grasp of foreign policy has been repeatedly questioned by national security experts on both sides of the political aisle. Cruz’s weakness in this area was again on display in Saturday night’s Republican presidential debate in New Hampshire, but this time the subject was North Korea.

North Korea’s missile launch was a good test of the candidates’ preparation and instincts on foreign policy because, as Martha Raddatz of ABC News explained, the test had been reported “just moments” before she asked the candidates about the issue.

She directed her first query at Cruz, providing him a golden opportunity to display his competence on the subject. Instead, he swung and missed, bizarrely claiming that “one of the greatest risks” is that North Korea would “detonate that nuclear weapon and set off what’s called an EMP, an electromagnetic pulse which could take down the entire electrical grid on the Eastern seaboard, potentially killing millions.”

EMP is one of the physical effects of a nuclear explosion and it does have the ability to fry electronics. It should, therefore, be somewhere on the list of possible threats and doing more to harden U.S. infrastructure from the effects of EMP would be worthwhile. But, it is nowhere near the top of the list of the most likely or devastating consequences of a nuclear-armed North Korea. It is hard to imagine North Korea conducting a bolt-out-of-the-blue EMP attack and, even if it did, the effects, while serious, would likely be less severe than many more plausible scenarios.

Rather, the greatest near-term threat posed by North Korea’s growing nuclear and missile capabilities is that Pyongyang will increasingly be able to hold the U.S. homeland at risk with the threat of nuclear attack, making Washington less willing and able to challenge North Korea.