Cruz, O’Rourke are oceans apart
Senate hopefuls blast each other’s stances on key foreign policy issues
U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and Congressman Beto O’Rourke are both frustrated that their two debates have included little discussion of foreign policy.
The two rivals in the hottest Senate race in the nation say voters need to know their vastly different approaches to key issues such as how the U.S. should respond to Russian aggression and American aid to Israel.
Cruz says O’Rourke has repeatedly declined to hold America’s enemies accountable for rogue behavior.
“Consistently on foreign policy, he’s at the extreme left of the Democratic caucus,” Cruz said of O’Rourke during an interview in San Antonio.
O’Rourke said Cruz’s votes are unnecessarily putting America’s military in harm’s way.
“Ted Cruz, if he has his way, is going to push us towards war,” O’Rourke said.
Cruz, from Houston, and
O’Rourke, from El Paso, have both been on Capitol Hill since 2012 and serve on key foreign relations related committees.
Cruz, 47, is on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and O’Rourke, 46, is on the House Armed Services Committee.
With less than two weeks until Election Day, we look at how they differ on major foreign policy issues. Iran nuclear deal
Maybe no foreign policy issue divides Cruz and O’Rourke more than the deal struck by six nations, led by the Obama administration, in 2015 that limited Iran’s nuclear capability in exchange for lifting international trade sanctions on the country.
O’Rourke supported it; Cruz was a persistent critic.
O’Rourke said he backed the nuclear deal because “without firing a single shot, without sacrificing the life of a single U.S. service member, it was able to stop the country of Iran from pursuing nuclear weapons.”
Iran’s stockpiles of enriched uranium have been reduced under the terms, which also bar Iran from producing weapons-grade plutonium.
Trump withdrew the U.S. from the deal in May, but Iran continues to comply with restrictions and work with European nations to find ways around U.S. sanctions.
O’Rourke said Trump’s decision has weakened the U.S. and made conflict more likely in the future.
“The alternative to a peacefully negotiated resolution to the threat that Iran poses is war,” O’Rourke said.
Cruz says the accord was never going to work and Iran continues to develop nuclear weapons and missile technology despite it.
“The Obama Iran nuclear deal has proven a catastrophic failure, funneling billions of U.S. dollars to the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism,” Cruz said earlier this year.
Russian aggression
In both televised debates between the two, O’Rourke took foreign policy shots at Cruz, accusing him of being too silent as President Trump seemed to embrace Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
“On that stage in Helsinki, as he defended Vladimir Putin instead of the United States of America, that was collusion in action,” O’Rourke said of Trump during the first senate debate in Dallas last month.
O’Rourke was referring to a July summit in Finland in which Trump refused to condemn Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. U.S. intelligence agencies have been unequivocal in concluding that Russia attempted to sway the election that resulted in Trump’s victory.
Cruz has said Trump made a mistake with Putin in Finland, but he has not criticized the president further. Still, Cruz has made clear on the campaign trail that he views Putin as a “KGB thug” and said the U.S. needs to stand up to Russian aggression.
Instead of going after Trump, Cruz blasts O’Rourke for being too soft on Russia. O’Rourke was one of two Democrats in the U.S. House in 2015 to vote in opposition to a bill condemning Russia’s armed intervention in Ukraine and its illegal annexation of Crimea. Then-U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Florida, was the other. The bill passed 399-19. “Congressman O’Rourke was one of the fringe on the far left who refused to condemn Russia for invading Ukraine, another sovereign nation,” Cruz said.
O’Rourke defends the vote, saying he would not approve sending “lethal” aid to Ukraine and further involving the U.S. in another global conflict.
“It was us becoming a participant in yet another war,” O’Rourke said listing the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, plus U.S. roles in conflicts in Syria, Libya, Somalia and Yemen. “I don’t know that deepening U.S. military involvement in Ukraine is going to solve that country’s problems. I’m not down with more war for the United States.”
Support for Israel
Both Cruz and O’Rourke say they support Israel but criticize each other for not doing enough.
Cruz has been the most aggressive on this issue, telling audiences at rallies that O’Rourke has failed to back Israel at key moments.
“On Israel, he has the most antiIsrael record of any Democratic Senate nominee in the country,” Cruz said at a rally in Katy earlier this month. “In 2014, when Hamas was raining rockets down on Israel, Beto O’Rourke was one of eight members of the House of Representatives to vote against funding Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system.”
But O’Rourke said he supports Israel and he has numerous other votes in which he voted to fund the Iron Dome and fully supports Israel’s ability to defend itself.
The U.S. has a long history of supporting the Iron Dome program, which tracks incoming rockets that could hit population centers and fires interceptors to knock them down. Israel says the system has a 90-percent success rate.
Prior to the August 2014 vote Cruz points to, Congress had already put about $700 million into the missile system and had just voted on a budget that would send another $351 million in October of 2014, according to the Congressional Research Service.
O’Rourke had supported the $351 million funding.
When conflict broke out again between Hamas and Israel in July 2014, Congress proposed sending the additional $225 million to Israel even though, according to some members of Congress, Israel still had unspent money from previous appropriations.
“When asked to add a supplemental quarter of a billion dollar appropriation to the Iron Dome without debate, without discussion, without any real information, I didn’t feel that I could in good conscience vote to spend that money,” O’Rourke said in an interview in Houston last month.
O’Rourke said Cruz has also cast votes against funding the Iron Dome, but said he’s not going to rail about those votes in public to make it look like Cruz doesn’t support Israel.
O’Rourke is referencing the National Defense Authorization Act of 2015 that Cruz voted against. It included $622 million for programs with Israel, including $351 million for Iron Dome.
O’Rourke said he strongly supports the U.S.-Israel relationship and “a two-state solution making sure that Israelis and Palestinians can live in peace and have security.”
The two-state solution in theory would create an independent state of Palestine alongside the state of Israel.
There again shows another difference on Israel between the two men. Cruz has stopped well short of endorsing a two-state solution, saying on the presidential trail in 2016 that he does not want the U.S. to tell Israel how to solve its differences with the Palestinians.
“This matter is an internal one for Israel to decide …” Cruz said in a 2016 statement.
O’Rourke and Cruz also are split on the U.S. moving its embassy to Jerusalem.
Palestinians want to control East Jerusalem, which was captured by Israel during the Six-Day War in 1967. Israel views all of Jerusalem as its capital.
Cruz traveled to Israel for a ceremony moving the embassy and has said he urged Trump to move the U.S. embassy there despite international pressure against the move.
O’Rourke has opposed the move, calling Trump’s decision “absolutely unnecessarily provocative.”