Republican presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) ratcheted up his attack on fellow contender Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) Monday by comparing his foreign policy worldview to that of President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
During a speech in New Hampshire Monday, Rubio slammed Cruz as an “isolationist” and mocked the loquacious Texas senator by noting that ISIS could not “be filibustered.”
Cruz told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview on his campaign bus in Iowa that he wasn’t surprised by Rubio’s assault.
“It’s not surprising that Senator Rubio, and others in the Republican field, are launching more and more desperate attacks,” he said. “We should protect the United States of America first. That means we shouldn’t engage in the kind of military adventurism that has characterized Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and sadly, far too many establishment Republicans including Marco Rubio.”
Cruz specifically pointed to Rubio’s support for intervening in Libya in 2011 as being in line with Obama and Clinton’s foreign policy.
“In Libya, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton led NATO in toppling the government there,” Cruz said. “Senator Rubio enthusiastically supported Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in toppling the government in Libya. The result was Libya became a lawless war zone governed by radical Islamic terrorists and that has profoundly endangered our national security.”
In his foreign policy address Monday, Rubio stood by his support for intervening in Libya, but he blamed the Obama administration for engaging in only “half-measures in Libya instead of doing what it would take to prevent terrorists from taking hold – terrorists who ultimately took the lives of four Americans in Benghazi.”
Cruz said that those who supported the Obama administration’s intervention in Libya bore some responsibility for the Sept. 11, 2012, terror attack that killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.
“Indeed, the tragic attack in Benghazi, where four Americans were killed, including the first American Ambassador killed in the line of service since the Jimmy Carter administration, occurred as a direct result of this administration’s failed policies in Libya,” Cruz said.
Cruz also hit “Washington Republican” Rubio for supporting the 2011 Egyptian Revolution that forced out longtime Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak and ultimately catapulted the Muslim Brotherhood to power.
“Likewise in Egypt, the Obama administration — again with the cheerleading of too many Washington Republicans — toppled the government of President Mubarak and handed control of that country over to [Mohamed] Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, a terrorist organization that has funded Islamic terrorists that seek to murder Americans across this country,” he said
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