RUTHFULLY YOURS

— Nine candidates took the stage here Tuesday night for the final primetime Republican debate of 2015, but in critical moments it seemed there were only two: Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.

The pair of freshmen senators went toe-to-toe several times, most notably on the issues of the National Security Agency’s data collection and immigration, participating in lengthy back-and-forth exchanges that left the other candidates sidelined while CNN featured the budding rivals in a split-screen presentation.

Tuesday may have foreshadowed a Rubio-Cruz battle for the nomination that more and more Republicans are now predicting, as Cruz continues to consolidate the support of conservative voters and Rubio emerges as the favorite of center-right, establishment-oriented voters. The headlines coming out of the Nevada debate could further cement the narrative of a collision course for the two senators, who presently occupy very different places in the Republican field. Rubio, despite strong debate performances, remains stuck in the mid-teens in early-state polling; Cruz this week surged to the top of several Iowa surveys and is gaining momentum nationally.

The looming threat to such a binary battle continues to be Donald Trump, who continues to place at or near the top of virtually every poll in the early nominating states. But the bombastic real-estate mogul was largely absent from the defining moments of Tuesday night’s debate inside the towering Venetian hotel and casino here on the famed Las Vegas strip.

The first direct conflict in the suddenly fierce rivalry between Senate colleagues, heretofore conducted via dueling press releases, came when co-moderator Dana Bash asked Rubio about Cruz’s support for a bill that limited the NSA’s ability to collect metadata from US citizens.

“Is Senator Cruz wrong?” Bash asked Rubio, who voted against the bill. “He is,” replied Rubio. “And so are those who voted for it.” His campaign fleshed out the jab hidden in those words with a press release showing Cruz surrounded by other senators who voted for the bill: Democrats Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, Al Franken, and Barbara Boxer.

The Republican debate may have been taking place in Vegas, but over it hung the shadows of the killings in San Bernardino. And many of the Republican candidates stepped up vowing a tougher fight against the Islamic State and other foreign enemies of the United States, including Russia and North Korea.

There were divisions over many of the details, but there was also a consensus that the war had to be won, the military had to be rebuilt and that the truth about terrorism had to be told.

“The war that we are fighting now against radical Islamist jihadists is one that we must win. Our very existence is dependent upon that,” Ben Carson said, after calling for a moment of silence for the victims of the San Bernardino Islamic terrorist attack.

Throughout the debate, Carson made political correctness into his target. America was a patient, he warned, who “would not be cured by political correctness.” He urged us to “get rid of all this PC stuff” and argued that we must do the right thing without worried about being labeled “Islamophobic”.

LAS VEGAS—Republican presidential contenders clashed Tuesday over how to protect the country from a future terrorist attack and what role the U.S. should play on an increasingly tumultuous world stage.

The result was a policy focused debate that opened divisions—and sparked personal attacks—between the party’s top candidates over how far to go in monitoring Americans’ phone data, whether to deploy more U.S. troops to the Middle East and the merits of regime change.

The centerpiece of the showdown was the evolving feud between Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida, two leading contenders to be Donald Trump’s primary alternative. The two senators fought over data-collection, military spending, immigration and whether to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

While Mr. Trump remains the front-runner, the fight between Messrs. Cruz and Rubio intensified a long-standing split inside the GOP between conservative insurgents and more pragmatic Republicans, a power struggle that has dogged the party for years.

The Republican presidential field agreed easily enough Tuesday night on the imperative of defeating the threat from Islamic State. They had much more trouble agreeing on whether the most important tool in that fight is a plan, or an attitude.

Sens. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz came to the stage offering detailed plans, as did former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina. They clashed on the details of those plans, particularly when the two senators disagreed on whether Mr. Cruz had undermined the effort to collect intelligence on terror programs by voting to curtail a program for gathering Americans’ phone data.

But Donald Trump, still the leader of the Republican pack, offered less in the way of an agenda for defeating Islamic State, also known as ISIS. More important, he said, is simply a hard-nosed attitude.

“The problem is we need toughness,” he said at one point. “We need tough people.”

Republican candidates disagreed over strategies to defeat Syrian President Bashir al Assad and whether or not an overthrow of of the leader is wise. Photo: AP

He said he was willing to shut down part of the Internet to stop terrorists from communicating with one another, but he was unclear on what that meant. He said he would enlist “brilliant people” to figure out how to stop their communications without interfering with the communications of others.