Calculable rather than chaotic

Lots of people are writing about the differences and similarities between Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. How would they be in foreign policy? Here is an excerpt from Spengler's piece in Asia Times:

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.

...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: China is becoming a world power, albeit a world power of a sort the West has trouble understanding, and Russia is fighting for national revival. These things are neither good nor bad for America, but exactly the opposite. From a Cruz administration we would expect the pursuit of American self-interest, which would mean a substantial improvement in military technology as well as collaboration with Russia and China where it suits American interests and opposition where it doesn’t.

I do not mean to suggest that Beijing or Moscow would be happy with a Cruz presidency. For one thing, it is likely that Cruz would try to widen the gap between America’s military technology and the rest of the world’s. But foreign policy, would be calculable rather than chaotic, and that is something America’s competitors could live with.

Read more here.