AP Conversation: Cruz's ambitious foreign policy has limits

With fiery rhetoric befitting his hero status within the tea party movement, he condemns the foreign policy of President Barack Obama and his first secretary of state, Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, as weak, ineffective and dangerous.

A gigantic mural hangs in Cruz's Senate office featuring the Republican icon standing in front of Berlin's Brandenburg Gate, making his famous call for Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall."

Yet while promising to destroy the Islamic State, beat back aggression from Russia, China and Iran, and ensure extremists don't infiltrate the U.S. homeland, Cruz also places notable limits on his approach to national security.

The 44-year-old first-term senator, trying to cement his place in the top tier of Republicans running for president, outlines a prospective foreign policy that is both broadly ambitious and cautious at times in the specifics.

Cruz sat down to share his view on national security and foreign affairs in an AP Conversation — a series of extended interviews with the candidates to become the nation's 45th president.

For Cruz, any discussion about how best to confront the Islamic State begins with criticism of Obama and a reminder that the president once said the U.S. did not "yet have a complete strategy" to defeat the group of violent Islamic extremists who have taken control of parts of Syria and Iraq.

While Cruz's goals are definitive, he is unwilling to go as far as several other Republican presidential contenders — among them, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush — who have said the battle against the Islamic State must include U.S. troops on the ground.

Cruz lashed out against plans released by the Obama administration on Tuesday to deploy a new special operations force to the region, a move that puts U.S. combat troops in a more permanent role in Iraq and Syria for the first time in the fight against the Islamic State.

Pressed to say under what circumstances he may favor dispatching a more substantial U.S. ground force, Cruz demurs, saying only that such scenarios exist in situations affecting "vital U.S. national security interests."

"If President Obama and Hillary Clinton and Sen. Rubio succeed in toppling Assad, the result will be the radical Islamic terrorists will take over Syria, that Syria will be controlled by ISIS, and that is materially worse for U.S. national security interests," he says.

"If you topple a stable ruler, throw a Middle Eastern country into chaos and hand it over to radical Islamic terrorists, that hurts America," he said, arguing that the U.S. has no place litigating civil wars abroad — especially those rooted in religious disputes among Muslims.

Cruz aligned himself with civil libertarians a year ago who fought to end the government's bulk collection of telephone records — taking on security hawks in his own party who warned that doing so would remove a valuable tool from authorities that helps protect the nation's security.