What Ted Cruz's Iran Moment Reveals About America's Foreign Policy Illiteracy

Newsweek

4 hours ago

On June 17, Tucker Carlson asked Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) what should have been a simple question: What is the population of Iran? Cruz didn't know. Carlson then asked him to name the country's major ethnic groups. Cruz came up blank again.
This was not a gotcha moment. It was a spotlight. Cruz is a senior U.S. senator, a former presidential candidate, and a vocal advocate for a hardline U.S. posture on Iran. The fact that he couldn't name the most basic demographic facts about the country he wants to confront says a lot about how foreign policy operates in the U.S., and who it's meant to impress.
Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) delivers remarks during a press conference on Capitol Hill on May 8, 2025, in Washington, D.C.
Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) delivers remarks during a press conference on Capitol Hill on May 8, 2025, in Washington, D.C.What happened in that exchange wasn't just awkward, it revealed something more troubling. It laid bare the way American foreign policy often functions: heavy on confidence, light on depth. When elected officials speak with authority but can't answer the most basic facts, it reveals more than a personal gap. It reflects a deeper failure in how we prepare, and tolerate, those who shape our foreign policy. Cruz reflects a pattern that's become far too common.
According to a 2020 Morning Consult/POLITICO poll, only 23 percent of Americans could locate Iran on a map. The rest pointed to Eastern Europe, South America, even Australia. And yet the same electorate regularly weighs in on questions of war, sanctions, regime change, and diplomatic withdrawal. The reality is that many Americans have strong views on foreign policy, but no geographic or historical grounding to anchor them.
In a moment of relative global calm, that gap might be more forgivable. But we aren't in a calm moment. In fact, we're in the most conflict-saturated period in recent history. According to the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), 2024 recorded the highest number of state-based armed conflicts since 1946. Sixty-one such conflicts were active last year, including four between nation-states, the highest number of interstate wars in over 35 years. Almost 130,000 people were killed in battle-related deaths globally.
We don't just live in a volatile world. We live in a dangerously mismatched one, where the complexity and lethality of modern conflict is rising, while public literacy about that complexity is falling.
And this isn't just a polling problem or a media failure. It's a democratic one. In a system built on civilian oversight of military and diplomatic power, ignorance becomes a liability. It allows narratives to be crafted not around facts, but around vibes. When voters can't distinguish between a proxy conflict and a territorial war, or don't understand where the Strait of Hormuz even is, it becomes easier for bad policy to sound like strong policy. Slogans win. Nuance loses.
This isn't just a voter problem. It's a leadership problem. When our lawmakers are allowed to posture confidently on matters of war and peace without even the most basic command of regional realities, the public follows their example. We normalize strategic amnesia. We reward theatrical strength over intellectual depth. And we end up with a foreign policy debate that centers on volume, not value.
We also risk generational disengagement. Younger voters are inheriting a global environment that is far more multipolar, fragmented, and ideologically diffuse than the Cold War framework their textbooks still teach. But they're doing so with less geographic instruction, less civic education, and more algorithmically filtered noise. If that continues, the quality of our foreign policy conversation will degrade even further, not just in accuracy, but in accountability.
This disconnect weakens democratic oversight. It makes military action easier to sell and harder to question. It elevates performative certainty over strategic thought. And it turns foreign policy into something closer to domestic theater, a place for identity posturing rather than global consequence management.
You don't need to be an expert on every region to have a valid opinion about the world. But you should at least be able to find the country on a map before you advocate for bombing it. And our elected officials should be able to answer basic demographic questions about the places they want to sanction or confront.
Because when they can't, and when we don't care that they can't, the result isn't just ignorance, it's escalation.
We are in a moment where ignorance no longer leads to inaction. It leads to conflict.
And we're going to pay for that gap with more than just polling errors. We're going to pay for it with human lives, diplomatic credibility, and the erosion of global stability itself.
Brett Erickson is a governance strategist and certified global sanctions specialist (CGSS). He serves on the advisory board of the Loyola University Chicago School of Law's Center for Compliance Studies.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.