Even Marco Rubio's JD hasn't been enough to salvage his Twitter feed:
LOL, that does that include when we annexed Texas so that they could keep slavery, which was banned in Mexico?
Actually, Texas was already independent from Mexico at the time. Granted it was a pretext and without going into the dynamics of Santa Anna being deposed by the time he signed the treaty, the actual dispute was over the location of the border between Texas and Mexico and the US wanted it all.
The actual hypocritical war was fought ten years earlier when a bunch of Southerners who had moved to Texas revolted so that they could have the freedom to run slave plantations there. Texas probably would have kept Slavery without the US annexing it and possibly beyond 1865.
The Texas revolt would have happened even without the issue of slavery. The centralizing policies of Santa Anna caused revolts in nonslaveholding regions of Mexico as well, for reasons in ways reminiscent of the American rebellion from England - taxes, disbanding of militia, limited representation, etc.
As far as Cruz's statement, for much of the history of America, and for other nations as well, people saw no contradiction between expanding freedom to others and expanding territory - the two might go hand in hand in the view of the people and their leaders. The British Navy fought the slave trade in the course of their imperialistic mission to dominate the world's seas. The Spanish-American War was fought to free the Cubans from tyranny and also to kick a rival out of the hemisphere. Maybe World War I is the closest thing to what Cruz is declaring, where the US didn't have a strategic territorial interest in contrast to the European powers. That didn't mean US foreign policy stopped caring about having control of geostrategic locales in other instances.
