“It only takes one in a sea of millions to destroy our safety and to take unknown numbers of innocent lives,” the Texan said at The Heritage Foundation.
The United States must do “whatever is necessary and required” to destroy the Islamic State, Sen. Ted Cruz said Thursday, laying out a muscular foreign policy that would target that terrorist army and reassert American leadership on the world stage.
Cruz, R-Texas, recalled Ronald Reagan’s decisive role in dismantling Soviet communism during the Cold War, saying that a similar track should be taken in the fight against today’s enemy: radical Islamic terrorism. Its bloodiest practitioner, he said, is the Islamic State, or ISIS.
“This is an enemy that can and will be defeated,” Cruz said during an hourlong speech at The Heritage Foundation in which he called President Obama “an apologist” for terrorism.
The massacre that left 130 dead in Paris last month and the recent attack in San Bernardino, Calif., that killed 14 underscore the need for American “vigilance” against terrorists, the Texas Republican said.
His foreign policy proposal included securing the nation’s southern border with a wall and preventing refugees who come from “terror-ridden countries,” particularly Syria, from entering the U.S.
“It only takes one in a sea of millions to destroy our safety and to take unknown numbers of innocent lives,” he said, noting reports confirming one of the Paris attackers Nov. 13 had entered the country using a fake Syrian passport.
Cruz advocated ramping up the U.S. bombing campaign in Iraq and Syria, where ISIS maintains a stronghold. But he stopped short of pushing for U.S. combat troops to put boots on the ground.
In an effort to strike middle ground between the Republican Party’s national security hawks and non-interventionists, Cruz fought against reauthorizing the federal government’s mass data collection program housed at the National Security Agency under the post-9/11 Patriot Act.
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