Senate race rivals eye foreign policy
U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and Congressman Beto O’Rourke are both frustrated that their only two debates included little discussion of foreign policy.
The two rivals in the nation’s hottest Senate race say voters need to know their vastly different approaches to key issues such as American aid to Israel and how the U.S. should respond to Russian aggression.
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 toward 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 committees whose purviews include foreign affairs. Cruz, 47, is on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and O’Rourke, 46, is on the House Armed Services Committee.
Here is a look at how they differ on major foreign policy questions.
Iran nuclear deal
Maybe no issue divides Cruz and O’Rourke more than the 2015 deal struck by six nations, led by the Obama administration, to limit Iran’s nuclear capability in exchange for lifting international trade sanctions on the country.
O’Rourke supported it; Cruz has been a persistent critic.
O’Rourke said he backed the agreement 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 agreement, which also bars Iran from producing weaponsgrade plutonium.
President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the pact in May, but Iran continues to comply with its restrictions and work with European nations to find ways around U.S. sanctions.
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.
Russian aggression
In the two televised debates between the candidates, O’Rourke took foreign policy shots at Cruz, accusing him of staying silent as 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 shift voter sentiment in Trump’s favor.
Cruz has said Trump made a mistake with Putin in Finland, but he has not criticized the president further. At the same time, 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 has criticized O’Rourke as too soft on Russia. O’Rourke was one of two Democrats in the U.S. House in 2015 who voted against a bill condemning Russia’s armed intervention in Ukraine and its annexation of Crimea. ThenU.S. Rep. Alan Grayson, DFlorida, was the other.
“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.
“It was us becoming a participant in yet another war,” O’Rourke said, citing the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, plus U.S. roles in conflicts in Syria, Libya, Somalia and Yemen.
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 anti-Israel 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 voted on other occasions to fund Iron Dome and that he fully supports Israel’s ability to defend itself.
Iron Dome 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.
Before the August 2014 vote Cruz has cited, Congress had already put about $700 million into the missile system and had just voted on a budget that would provide another $351 million, according to the Congressional Research Service.
O’Rourke voted for the $351 million in funding.
O’Rourke said Cruz has cast votes against Iron Dome, but said he’s not going to rail about it in public to make it look like Cruz doesn’t support Israel. O’Rourke was referring to Cruz’s vote against the National Defense Authorization Act of 2015. The legislation 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 twostate solution making sure that Israelis and Palestinians can live in peace and have security.”
Cruz has stopped short of endorsing a two-state solution, saying on the presidential campaign trail in 2016 that he did 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.