Both took turns using hawkish rhetoric about Iran: While Gingrich equated allowing Iran to develop a nuclear weapon with allowing a second Holocaust, Huntsman said Iran was “the transcendent threat of this decade.”

Gingrich advocated forcing Iran to dismantle its nuclear weapons program – “we’re ideally going to do it nonmilitarily, but we are not going to tolerate an Iranian nuclear weapon” -- while Huntsman warned that additional sanctions on Iran “won’t work because the mullahs in Tehran have already decided they want to go nuclear.”

“I think we all need to conclude that this is going to be the United States doing it our way at the end of the day,” Huntsman said. “Which isn’t all bad. I think we work better when left to our own devices.”