With the first primary contests just around the corner, however, all the candidates have been offering up more details as they seek to establish their national security credentials. Al-Monitor unpacks the rhetoric to get to the meat of the positions staked out by the top six Republicans and top two Democrats, according to the Real Clear Politics polling average for Dec. 10-Dec. 21.

So far, the US presidential campaign has been dominated by bellicose sound bites as these and other Republican hopefuls make their case that President Barack Obama has made the country less safe. The harsh rhetoric serves both to appeal to an anxious electorate while undermining Obama’s former secretary of state, Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton.

And New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie says even Syrian refugees who are “orphans under age 5” shouldn’t be admitted into the country unless the FBI can vet them fully.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has vowed to drop so much ordnance on Iraq and Syria that the world will find out “if sand can glow in the dark.”

Real estate mogul Donald Trump promises to “bomb the shit” out of the self-proclaimed Islamic State (IS) and keep Muslims out if he’s elected president.

Another US war in the Middle East?

Over the past few months, the US military presence has steadily increased to about 3,500 troops in Iraq and several dozen special operations forces in Syria. While none of the remaining candidates have echoed calls by withdrawn contender Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., to send 20,000 US troops to Iraq and Syria, most support a more robust US presence.

“We have around 3,500 soldiers and Marines in Iraq, and more may well be needed,” former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said in an August IS policy speech at the Ronald Reagan Library in California. “We do not need, and our friends do not ask for, a major commitment of American combat forces. But we do need to convey that we are serious.”

Bush, who is currently tied for fifth place with Christie, went on to urge deploying forward air controllers to help guide precision airstrikes and embedding US troops with Iraqi combat units. These views mirror those of the other Republican running as a traditional GOP hawk, third-place candidate Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.

Christie urged France to invoke the NATO treaty’s Article 5 on collective defense after the attack in Paris. He said he would work with NATO alliance to “bring the full effect that we could have … militarily” against IS during a November speech at the Council on Foreign Relations but offered few other details.

Trump, Cruz and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson — respectively in first, second and fourth place in national polls — have urged ramped-up airstrikes but said little else about a US military role.

On the Democratic side, Clinton sounds much like Bush and Rubio even as she defends Obama’s overall strategy.

“A more effective coalition air campaign is necessary, but not sufficient, and we should be honest about the fact that to be successful, airstrikes will have to be combined with ground forces actually taking back more territory from ISIS [IS],” she said at the Council on Foreign Relations in November. “As part of that process, we may have to give our own troops advising and training the Iraqis greater freedom of movement and flexibility, including embedding in local units and helping target airstrikes.”

In contrast, her main rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has repeatedly warned against repeating the 2003 intervention in Iraq, which he — unlike Clinton — voted against.

“This is a war for the soul of Islam,” he says on his campaign website, “and the Muslim nations must become more heavily engaged.”

Bypassing Baghdad

While all the candidates sing the Kurds’ praises, some have been more explicit about their plans to bypass Baghdad if they win the presidency.

Cruz regularly refers to the Kurds as “America’s troops on the ground.” And Clinton, Bush and Rubio have explicitly called for directly arming not only the Kurds but Sunni tribal forces as well.

Defeating IS “will require a larger number of American troops on the ground, working with the Kurds, Sunni tribes, and other partners,” Rubio writes on his campaign website. He vows to “provide arms directly to Sunni tribal and Kurdish forces if Baghdad fails to support them.”

Clinton told the Council on Foreign Relations that “one thing that I believe we haven’t done yet is make it clear to Baghdad that we are going to be arming Sunni tribes and Kurds if they don’t.” The Iraqi Embassy in Washington lambasted a House-passed bill to arm the Kurds in December and Shiite hard-liners threatened to attack US interests in Iraq when the House Armed Services panel in May proposed to deem Kurds and Sunni tribes as “countries” eligible for US military assistance.

Carson has proposed the creation of a US-defended safe zone inside Iraq. Christian groups have long advocated for the creation of a semi-autonomous safe zone for religious minorities in Iraq’s Ninevah plain, an idea that has stalled in the Iraqi parliament.

“We should encourage the establishment of sanctuary zones in the contested areas of Iraq and Syria,” Carson says in a Washington Post column. “These zones would be administered and controlled by local moderate forces, with financial support and military coordination provided by Western countries.”

Bridging the Sunni-Shiite divide

Another fault line among the candidates lies in their willingness to engage the US diplomatic corps in efforts to reconcile Iraq’s warring factions.

Here again, Clinton, Rubio and Bush appear to have given the most thought to the issue — and come to quite similar conclusions. All three agree that the next president will have to continue working with the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad to create a more inclusive nation that encourages more Sunni tribes to rise up against IS.

“Our strategy in Iraq has to restart the serious diplomatic efforts that can help that country move in the right direction,” Bush said in his Reagan Library speech.

Clinton told the Council on Foreign Relations that “we need to lay the foundation for a second Sunni awakening. We need to put sustained pressure on the government in Iraq to get its political house in order, move forward with national reconciliation, and finally stand up a national guard.”

The other candidates have said little on the subject — expect for Cruz, who has dismissed it as a fool’s errand.

“We must reject the notion that any U.S. action be contingent on political reconciliation between Sunnis and Shiites in Baghdad,” he wrote in a September 2014 commentary for CNN.com. “The Sunnis and Shiites have been engaged in a sectarian civil war since 632. While we all wish the Iraqis success in their most recent attempt to form a government, it is the height of hubris and ignorance to make American national security contingent on the resolution of a 1,500-year-old religious conflict.”

Middle East experts, however, contend that the bloody sectarian feud between the two main strains of Islam is a mostly modern phenomenon fueled by Saudi-Iranian rivalry.

The Assad conundrum: Should he stay or should he go?

When it comes to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, most of the candidates agree with US foreign policy dogma that he’s a key catalyst of the sectarian fire that has engulfed Syria over the past five years.

Trump and Cruz, however, have steadfastly opposed efforts to unseat the sitting president or arm his opponents, revealing a deep fault line within the Republican Party on the limits of US interventionism in the wake of the wars in Iraq and Libya.

“Just because Assad is a murderous thug does not mean that the rebels opposing him are necessarily better,” Cruz declared way back in September 2013 in explaining his decision to vote against airstrikes in retaliation for Assad’s use of chemical weapons.

Two years later, he’s still saying the same thing.

“In my view, we have no dog in the fight of the Syrian civil war,” Cruz told Bloomberg Politics in a November interview. “The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. If the Obama administration and the Washington neo-cons succeed in toppling Assad, Syria will be handed over to radical Islamic terrorists. ISIS will rule Syria.”

Trump for his part echoes those sentiments.

“Assad is bad,” Trump told The Guardian in an October interview. “Maybe these people could be worse.”

The other candidates largely agree that the US should continue to support so-called “moderate” rebels — while acknowledging that there may not be very many around anymore, if there ever were.

“Defeating ISIS requires defeating Assad,” Bush said in his Reagan Library speech, “but we have to make sure that his regime is not replaced by something as bad or worse.” He called for a “coordinated, international effort” to “to give Syria’s moderate forces the upper hand.”

Clinton has said “there is no alternative to a political transition that allows Syrians to end Assad’s rule,” while Christie has said, “I don’t think that there is a coherent opposition at the moment.”

Time for a no-fly zone in Syria?

Of all the major candidates, only Cruz and Sanders agree with Obama that creating a no-fly zone to protect Syrian civilians isn’t worth the risk of dragging the United States deeper into a protracted sectarian civil war.

The other candidates all favor the establishment of some kind of safe zone in Syria, albeit with different levels of US involvement. For the Republicans, that support has the added benefit of providing some political cover for their unanimous rejection of plans to allow Muslim Syrian refugees into the United States.

Trump has called for the creation of a “big, beautiful safe zone” in Syria, largely paid for by the Gulf states with the United States giving “a little bit.” Exactly who would be tasked with keeping the zone “safe” remains unclear.

Christie, by contrast, has advocated shooting down Assad-allied Russian warplanes if they were to violate a putative no-fly zone.

“We would shoot down the planes of Russian pilots if in fact they were stupid enough to think that this president was the same feckless weakling that the president we have in the Oval Office is right now,” Christie said at Republican presidential debate in December.

Rubio said much the same thing in a CNBC interview in October 2015.

Clinton, meanwhile, has been pushing the idea since the summer of 2012, when she was still the nation’s top diplomat.

Reining in Iran

Finally, several of the candidates have made Iran a key plank of their anti-IS strategy.

Bush and Rubio agree that weakening Iran’s influence over Baghdad was crucial to easing sectarian tensions and getting more Iraqis to join in the fight.

“Iran, its ally Assad, its terrorist proxy Hezbollah and the sectarian militias it sponsors have fueled the conflicts in Syria and Iraq that have helped give rise to ISIS,” Bush said at the Reagan Library. “We need to broaden and expedite our efforts to help ensure Iraqis rebuild their security sector — not only to win against ISIS, but to break free of Iranian influence.”

Meanwhile, Clinton and Christie have both explicitly argued that Saudi Arabia and other key Sunni powers are currently more focused on fighting the Houthis in Yemen than IS in Iraq and Syria in part because they feel threatened by Tehran. The hard line on Iran is particularly important for Clinton, whom the Republicans have pegged to Obama’s controversial nuclear deal.

“We cannot view Iran and ISIS as separate challenges. Regional politics are too interwoven,” she told the council in November. “Raising the confidence of our Arab partners and raising the costs to Iran for bad behavior will contribute to a more effective fight against ISIS.”

Correction: This article was updated Jan. 6 to clarify that Sen. Marco Rubio has also advocated shooting down Russian aircraft if they were to violate a US-backed no-fly zone in Syria.