Cruz, Rubio battle over foreign-policy expertise in Iowa.

By Quentin Misiag
[email protected]

Sen. Marco Rubio — locked in an intense foreign-policy duel with Sen. Ted Cruz — escalated his calls against ISIS on Thursday, suggesting to Iowans that the terrorist group isn’t being properly contained.

“This is a group that continues to grow,” the Republican presidential hopeful said about the group. “They are not being contained and they cannot be contained. They must be defeated.”

Rubio — who often touts the need to build up the U.S. military — said the country should support Middle Eastern allies with special-forces unit on the ground.

“We have not done a good of enough job explaining who ISIS is,” Rubio said, before encouraging those in attendance to research ISIS’s propaganda magazine.

It was far from the first time Rubio has called to defeat the radical group.

For more than a month, the two candidates and their operatives have been going back and forth with each other on national-security politics following a slate of recent terrorist attacks.

Team Rubio has dug deep at Cruz for supporting the USA Freedom Act, which implemented changes to U.S. surveillance. It restored several provisions of the Patriot Act.

Recently, Cruz has blamed Rubio for trying to distract him from working on a comprehensive immigration bill in the Senate.

Since the beginning of the year, Rubio has only cast Senate votes about two-thirds of the time he could have, records show. That’s the worst attendance of any senator running for the presidential nomination.

On what was his third and final Iowa stop of the day, the Florida senator worked to prove to an audience of more than 400 that his foreign-policy chops are razor sharp.

While he didn’t once name rival Cruz, Rubio spent much of a one-hour appearance reiterating his roadmap to curtailing ISIS’ efforts.

Working to drum up support from the crowd — largely composed of University of Iowa students — he said the U.S. cannot stop ISIS alone.

“A radical Sunni movement can only be defeated by Sunnis themselves, and we must empower them to do so,” Rubio said, standing underneath nearly 30 Iowa Hawkeye football banners adjacent to the north end zone of Kinnick Stadium.

Cruz too has upped his foreign policy talks since the recent shooting massacre in San Bernardino, California.

“If I am elected, we will utterly destroy ISIS,” Cruz said in a stop in Des Moines last week. “We won’t weaken them. We won’t degrade them. We will utterly destroy them. We will carpet-bomb them into oblivion.”

Both candidates are 44-year-old Cuban Americans who are currently serving first terms as senators.

Some see Rubio as the GOP’s new establishment front-runner, while others view Cruz as a rising Iowa star, quickly scooping up support from the more conservative segment.

Cruz won his second major Iowa conservative endorsement on Thursday, when Bob Vander Plaats, president of the Family Leader, endorsed him for president.

Conservative hardliner Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, endorsed Cruz last month.

Cruz leads Rubio in the latest CNN/ORC poll in Iowa, published Dec. 7.

Of the 552 likely Iowa Republican caucus-goers surveyed, 20 percent said they would be most likely to support Cruz. Thirty-three percent said they would be most likely to support New York businessman Donald Trump. In all, 11 percent said they saw Rubio as their most likely candidate who would have their vote.

The Republican poll, conducted by phone between Nov. 28 and Dec. 6, had a margin of error of plus or minus four percentage points.

Explaining to the crowd of what he believed ISIS’s potential growth was, Rubio finished: “This is a war that can be won. We have no choice but to win it.”