Angelo Codevilla asks readers of The Federalist website to ponder the potential foreign policy preferences of a Tea Party president.

Having practiced law at the highest levels, Cruz has had little time to think deeply about foreign affairs. Carson, busy advancing the theory and practice of brain surgery, has had even less. Indiana has occupied Pence’s heart and mind. These and similar persons, however, would bring to the presidency a set of attitudes that is second nature in American society’s Tea Party contingent—attitudes that make for a foreign policy very different from that of progressives or Libertarians, as well as from of our bipartisan establishment’s neoconservative consensus.

Tea Party patriotism, for example, differs substantially from the neoconservative kind now standard in the Republican establishment, the Wall Street Journal, or Fox News. The difference lies in contrasting visions of America’s greatness, which have divided America’s rank-and-file from the people who have run U.S. foreign policy since Woodrow Wilson. For these, America’s greatness, our value, is our capacity to lead and improve mankind by settling its quarrels.

By contrast, Tea Party Americans, hearkening as they do to statesmen from George Washington to Theodore Roosevelt, the men on Mount Rushmore, as well as to Ronald Reagan see America’s greatness as that of the “city on a hill,” which keeps itself exceptional to mankind’s corruption, whose example may or may not inspire others to follow. Hence a Tea Party president would be more reluctant than a Republican to make foreign commitments.

But, following America’s pre-Progressive tradition and popular sentiment, a Tea Party president would use all of America’s power to defend America’s interests and to keep its commitments. That includes waging war in the dictionary meaning of the term—killing and destroying massively and quickly until the enemy ceases to resist, or to exist—unto victory and peace. For example, if a Tea Party president had committed America to destroying the Islamic State that beheads Americans, persons from Minneapolis, Melbourne, or Manchester who now yearn to imitate or to join the Islamic State would instead be aghast at its gruesome end and discredit.

As John Hood has warned, North Carolinians might end up getting relatively early exposure to Tea Party candidates’ foreign policy ideas, given the nature of the 2016 election calendar.