Trump’s UN speech echoed the views of another Republican: Ted Cruz

Heather Hurlburt wrote for Polyarchy on Vox about Trump's UN speech reflects Ted Cruz's long-held views about sovereignty. 

To much of the US political and national security establishments, raised on two generations of Cold War alliances and US domination of post-World War II international institutions, this worldview is either nonsensical or fringe. But Trump is not alone: It happens to be the worldview of the man who came in second in the 2016 GOP primary, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.

Like Trump, Cruz is often perceived as having no core beliefs on national security and foreign policy, allowing his positions to be shaped entirely by political expediency. This is a misapprehension. Cruz’s commitment to an originalist interpretation of the Constitution includes the belief that it requires holding American national interest apart from ties of commerce, values, or alliance. As he puts it, “I personally have been passionate for a long, long time about protecting US sovereignty.”....

....For conservative sovereigntists like Cruz, treaties and treaty regimes, such as the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (which the US Senate failed to ratify in 2012) or the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, have no application. Written and customary international law doesn't apply, as Cruz argued successfully in the Texas death penalty case. Not only do human rights not transcend borders but copyright, taxation, and trade dispute resolution mechanisms don't either.