“Vagueness In, Vagueness Out”: Foreign Policy Is Hard For Mitt Romney
In today’s Wall Street Journal, Mitt Romney takes to the op-ed page to offer his vision for a new American policy in the Middle East. Apparently, the tragic recent events in Benghazi have convinced Romney and his advisors that something is going on over there, and though they aren’t sure exactly what, it’s definitely something, and therefore Romney ought to come and say something about it, to show everyone how wrong Barack Obama is. If you thought Romney was being vague about his domestic policy, that’s nothing compared to what he has to say about foreign policy.
The first half of the piece is the standard criticism of the Obama administration (he’s weak!), and here’s the part where Romney lays out in specific detail exactly what he’d do differently:
In this period of uncertainty, we need to apply a coherent strategy of supporting our partners in the Middle East—that is, both governments and individuals who share our values. This means restoring our credibility with Iran. When we say an Iranian nuclear-weapons capability—and the regional instability that comes with it—is unacceptable, the ayatollahs must be made to believe us.
It means placing no daylight between the United States and Israel. And it means using the full spectrum of our soft power to encourage liberty and opportunity for those who have for too long known only corruption and oppression. The dignity of work and the ability to steer the course of their lives are the best alternatives to extremism.
But this Middle East policy will be undermined unless we restore the three sinews of our influence: our economic strength, our military strength and the strength of our values. That will require a very different set of policies from those President Obama is pursuing.
The 20th century became an American Century because we were steadfast in defense of freedom. We made the painful sacrifices necessary to defeat totalitarianism in all of its guises. To defend ourselves and our allies, we paid the price in treasure and in soldiers who never came home. Our challenges are different now, but if the 21st century is to be another American Century, we need leaders who understand that keeping the peace requires American strength in all of its dimensions.
OK, so what do we have here? America needs to support our partners. We need to restore our credibility with Iran, by making them believe that we really, really don’t want them to have nuclear weapons. We need to place no daylight between ourselves and Israel. And we need to encourage liberty and opportunity. That line about “the dignity of work” is a little odd—maybe the problem they have in the Middle East is too many 47 percenters? So where’s the new policy again?
But in the next paragraph, he says he’s going to give us “a very different set of policies.” So here it comes, right? The answer is … “American strength in all its dimensions.” Ah yes. Strength. Resolve. If you ask “How, precisely, will you achieve these goals?” then you’re obviously a weakling who can’t grasp the full majesty of Mitt Romney’s chin, which when jutted in the direction of our adversaries will make them quake before us and submit to our demands.
I can muster a little bit of sympathy for Romney here. Middle East politics is hard! A permanent settlement between the Israelis and the Palestinians seems all but impossible, particularly given that the policy of the Israeli government essentially comes down to “the beatings will continue until morale improves.” The question of Iran’s nuclear aspirations offers nothing but bad alternatives. Romney keeps saying he wants America to “shape events” in the Middle East, but as president after president has discovered, that’s a tall order. You can certainly shape events by invading somebody, but that tends to come with some problematic repercussions.
But the real reason Romney seems incapable of offering any specific policies he wants to change is that he can’t quite figure out which Obama policies he objects to. His criticism is that Obama is “weak,” so the alternative he offers is that he’ll be “strong.” Vagueness in, vagueness out.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, October 1, 2012
“The Real Awful Mitt Romney”: The Epitome Of Jawdroppingly Stupid Arrogant Privilege
If you thought Mitt Romney had a rotten summer—failing to project a more appealing image of himself and his policies, failing to pin the country’s economic woes on the president, failing to get even the tiniest bounce from his convention—the home stretch is shaping up even worse. Fast on the heels of his aggressively wrong-headed response to the embassy attack in Libya (which gets terrible reviews from most Americans), Mother Jones today released a bombshell video of Romney speaking way too candidly to a small group of well-heeled campaign contributors.
This is must-see footage—and even if you don’t want to see it, you won’t be able to help it over the next few days. These are words that will haunt Romney for the rest of the campaign—and the rest of his political career. He jokes that he’d have a better chance of being elected if he were of Mexican lineage; he insults Obama voters (and 47 percent of the country) in the most stereotypical and racially-tinged terms possible; he brags about sharing campaign consultants with Bibi Netanyahu; and he insists that Americans are, basically, too empty-headed to care about policy specifics. And this is only the first batch of videos to come; God only knows what else he might have let loose with.
We can’t sum it up better than David Corn, who got this “get” for MoJo: “With this crowd of fellow millionaires, he apparently felt free to utter what he really believes and would never dare say out in the open. He displayed a high degree of disgust for nearly half of his fellow citizens, lumping all Obama voters into a mass of shiftless moochers who don’t contribute much, if anything, to society, and he indicated that he viewed the election as a battle between strivers (such as himself and the donors before him) and parasitic free-riders who lack character, fortitude, and initiative. … These were sentiments not to be shared with the voters; it was inside information, available only to the select few who had paid for the privilege of experiencing the real Romney.”
Romney’s comments will inevitably be likened to Barack Obama’s infamous slur (also recorded in a private donor meeting) about white Pennsylvanians clinging to guns and religion. Both expressed the kind of disdain for their fellow Americans that no candidate should allow to escape his or her lips. But in terms of political impact, this is sure to play much worse. For one thing, that was April 2008, and this is mid-September 2012—leaving the candidate little time to recover. Another essential difference: Obama was well-liked and admired by the vast majority of Americans when he had his bigoted slip of the lip; Romney is already overwhelmingly disliked, even by many who plan to vote for him. Obama’s comments surprised people; Romney’s comments confirm what people already suspected about him. He comes across as the epitome of arrogant privilege.
There is no way that this glimpse into the “real Romney” won’t turn off a large majority of the country—including plenty of the same people of privilege he was speaking to in that room. Even if they agree with the candidate secretly, they will have some serious second thoughts: How could anyone running for president, for pete’s sake, be so breathtakingly, jaw-droppingly stupid as to utter such things aloud?
By: Bob Moser, The American Prospect, September 17, 2012
“Romney Owes An Apology”: A Cynical And Dishonest Effort To Take Advantage Of A National Tragedy
To a certain extent, no one should be surprised by Mitt Romney’s decision to seize on — actually, make that exploit — the attack on U.S. diplomatic outposts in Egypt and Libya as ammunition in the presidential campaign.
After all, the Republican presidential nominee wrote a book in 2010 premised on, and titled with, the false notion that Barack Obama has been going around the world apologizing for America.
“There are anti-American fires burning all across the globe; President Obama’s words are like kindling to them,” Romney wrote in “No Apology: The Case for American Greatness.”
Romney repeated this falsehood in his acceptance speech in Tampa, claiming that Obama launched his presidency “with an apology tour.”
Oddly enough, Romney’s evidence for Obama’s alleged apologizing is bereft of certain words — like apology, or sorry, or regret. To Romney, apologizing means never actually having to say you’re sorry.
In the speeches that Romney criticized, Obama concedes imperfections and even mistakes in American behavior, but he couples those acknowledgments with critiques of other nations as well.
Thus, in his 2009 Cairo speech, Obama referred to the “tumultuous history” between the United States and Iran, noting that “in the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government.” Then he immediately pivoted to Iran’s “role in acts of hostage-taking and violence against U.S. troops and civilians.”
This is more factual recitation of history than craven slobbering, yet to Romney it is part of “the steady stream of criticisms, put-downs and jabs directed at the nation he was elected to represent and defend.”
So when the U.S. Embassy in Cairo released a statement condemning “the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims,” Romney was predisposed to see it through the distorted, if politically convenient, lens of apology.
Facts be damned. The embassy statement was issued Tuesday morning, before the protests started, not to mention before the embassy walls were breached, not to mention before there was a murderous assault on U.S. diplomats in Libya. On Tuesday night, Romney issued his statement describing the administration’s behavior as “disgraceful” and charging that its “first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.”
By that point, the Cairo embassy, the State Department spokesman and the secretary of State had all condemned the attacks. “Let me be clear,” Hillary Clinton’s statement said. “There is never any justification for violent acts of this kind.”
As irresponsible as Romney’s behavior Tuesday night, even worse was his move to double down at a Wednesday morning news conference, following word of the deaths of the U.S. ambassador and three other American diplomats in Libya. Tuesday night, before the killings were known, was amateurish. Wednesday morning was unconscionable.
“It’s never too early for the United States government to condemn attacks on Americans and to defend our values,” Romney said, apparently believing that the embassy should have been able to foretell the attack before it occurred. In the space of three sentences, he criticized the administration for standing by the embassy statement and accused it of sending “mixed signals” by disavowing it.
The question and answer session was even worse. “Simply put, having an embassy which . . . has been breached and has protesters on its grounds, having violated the sovereignty of the United States, having that embassy reiterate a statement effectively apologizing for the right of free speech is not the right course for an administration,” Romney said.
Leaving aside his flawed timeline — later tweets from the embassy combined criticism of anti-Muslim bigotry with condemnation of the attacks — Romney’s interpretation of what constitutes an apology is once again far off-base.
“We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others,” the original embassy statement said. This formulation reflects a sensitive balancing of competing interests, not an apology for free speech. You can deplore the idiocy of the movie but defend to the death the producer’s right to make it.
To Romney, this amounts to “a disgraceful statement on the part of our administration to apologize for American values.”
There is something disgraceful happening here, but it doesn’t involve a comment by an obscure embassy spokesman. It is Romney’s cynical, dishonest effort to take advantage of this national tragedy for his own political ends.
By: Ruth Marcus, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 13, 2012
“Inconvenient Facts”: Mitt Romney’s Foreign Policy Would Play Into The Terrorists’ Hands
This, apparently, is the sum total of Mitt Romney’s case for being better at foreign policy than Barack Obama: He’s better at rattling sabers than the president is. And while in many ways that means the substance of Romney’s would-be policy really isn’t that different from Obama’s, the stylistic differences are dangerous. To put it bluntly, the kind of swaggering, blustering foreign policy Romney and his neocon advisers favor plays right into the hands of the people who do things like attack and kill U.S. diplomats.
The domestic/political portion of this fight started Tuesday when the Romney campaign issued a statement condemning the Obama administration for what Team Romney characterized as sympathizing with the terrorists who had killed an American consulate worker in Benghazi (the full facts of four Americans, including the ambassador, having been killed were at that point still unknown). That the statement in question was issued before the deadly attacks and without the administration’s clearance proved of little interest to Romney and his advisers who then doubled down even in the face of the inconvenient facts as well as widespread criticism for politicizing a foreign crisis.
Here’s where things stood by week’s end: Romney had resorted to justifying his attacks on the administration by pointing out that the White House had repudiated the offending statement and was, finally, reduced to chastising the Cairo embassy for not updating its Web site fast enough. And while he and his allies had characterized the statement, which condemned an anti-Muslim online video, as an apology for American values, he had … condemned the anti-Muslim online video. Finally, in an interview broadcast Friday morning, Romney told ABC News that he had the same “red line” as Obama in regards to Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon.
What’s left in terms of how Romney would conduct foreign policy differently? Romney would talk loudly while brandishing a big stick. Marc Ambinder notes that he seems to subscribe to the theory of “provocative weakness“—that anything less than a robustly muscular U.S. global posture invites very bad things. So under a Romney administration, an adviser to the candidate opined to the Washington Post, there would be no attacks on American embassies or diplomats for fear of American toughness.
“There’s a pretty compelling story that if you had a President Romney, you’d be in a different situation,” Richard Williamson, a top Romney foreign policy adviser, said in an interview. “For the first time since Jimmy Carter, we’ve had an American ambassador assassinated.”
Williamson added, “In Egypt and Libya and Yemen, again demonstrations — the respect for America has gone down, there’s not a sense of American resolve and we can’t even protect sovereign American property.”
That is a compelling story, if only because it’s so fantastical. Let’s unpack it: Disgruntled Muslims wouldn’t take to the streets if Romney were president because they’d be cowed by American resolve? How does that work? They’d be worried that if they demonstrated President Romney would give them all a stern talking to? Or that he’d send in SEAL Team Six to quiet them down?
The “provocative weakness” theory falls apart in the face of nonstate actors on the world stage, people for whom American force is less a threat than a recruiting tool. The fact of the matter is that assuming the people who killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and his three colleagues were al Qaeda allies or sympathizers (or al Qaeda itself), they didn’t attack the U.S. embassy because they didn’t fear a U.S. response; they crave a U.S. response, preferably of the ham handed, military variety to bolster their recruiting and inflame the kind of anti-American sentiment that is so clearly present in the Muslim world today.
“[Osama] bin Laden, when he was alive, was very consciously aware that encouraging the United States to lead with its chin—to lead with a military response to everything—would bog us down,” says Heather Hurlburt, executive director of the National Security Network. “And that was very much part of bin Laden’s vision and you could see that on jihadi chat boards and so on.”
And it’s worth noting that the “provocative weakness” theory hasn’t held up in the real world either. As Kevin Drum writes today :
At one level, of course, this is just dumb campaign bravado. Your guy is weak and vacillating and our enemies laugh at him. My guy is strong and resolute and our enemies fear him. But it’s also nonsense. Reagan’s resolve didn’t stop Lebanese militants from bombing a Marine barracks in Beirut. Bush Sr.’s resolve didn’t stop Saddam Hussein from invading Kuwait. Bush Jr.’s resolve didn’t stop al-Qaeda from destroying the World Trade Center and killing 3,000 Americans.
In that respect, anyway, Romney’s foreign policy is much like his domestic policy: Light on details but apparently a retread of the same stuff that didn’t work out so well the first couple of times we tried them.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, September 14, 2012
“Indisputably Clear”: We Can’t Trust Mitt Romney With Our National Security
The events of the last 48 hours have made it indisputably clear: America cannot trust Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan with our national security.
This morning’s Huffington Post headline summarized what it called, “The Verdict: Most Craven and Ill-Advised Move…Not Worthy of A President… Bungle… Utter Disaster… Not Presidential… Lehman Moment… Over the Top… Desperate… Awesomely Awful.”
Notwithstanding the horrible reviews, Romney and his campaign tripled down on their criticism of President Obama and the American diplomats who were on the ground and about to come under attack.
Romney’s neocon foreign policy adviser, Richard Williamson, told the Washington Post that, “There is a pretty compelling story that if you had a President Romney, you’d be in a different situation.” He’s right about that. We’d be in a very different — and dangerous — situation if Mitt Romney were in charge of American national security. There are at least five reasons why every American should be frightened at the prospect of Mitt Romney as Commander-in-Chief.
1). Mitt Romney has no guiding principles when it comes to foreign policy — or anything else for that matter — but one: his own personal ambition. Tuesday night Romney demonstrated once again that he would take any cheap shot that he thought would serve his ambition to be president, regardless of its impact on American national security or our people on the ground.
Of course this is nothing new. Romney has demonstrated time and time again that he has no lasting commitment to principle whatsoever. He has gone from being pro-choice to ardently anti-abortion; morphed from a Massachusetts moderate to a “severe conservative”; demonstrated his willingness to buy companies, load them with debt, bleed them dry and destroy the lives of workers and communities all to make money for himself and his investors.
After favoring immigration reform in the past, Romney became the most anti-immigrant major presidential candidate in modern history.
Romney drafted and passed RomneyCare and then promised to repeal a similar bill when one was passed by President Obama and a Democratic Congress. Why? Because that’s what the thought was necessary to get the Republican nomination for president.
Romney has no North Star guiding his behavior except his desire to enhance his own personal wealth and his own driving ambition.
Someone like that is the last guy you want to trust to make the tough decisions to protect American national security. Great statesmen are people who think more about the next generation than the next election. They are people who are willing to take the political heat because they are committed to doing what is right to protect the American people. They are heroes of John Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage, not the men described in John Dean’s book on the Nixon White House, Blind Ambition.
2). Mitt Romney has no vision. In his acceptance speech to the Republican Convention he made fun of President Obama’s concern for global climate change and his commitment toward the elimination of nuclear weapons. Romney actually opposed passage of the START II Treaty with Russia that reduced nuclear weapons to their current levels.
Romney flat-out opposes — makes fun of — investments in renewable energy sources that would begin the process of freeing us from the tyranny of Big Oil — and oil dictators — and addresses the problem of climate change.
Rather than support movements to limit the exploding growth in the world’s population, Romney actually opposes support for birth control.
Have you ever heard word one from Romney about protecting our natural resources, or investment in de-salinization, or strengthening the international co-operation needed to deal with cyber-security, or frankly any of these critical issues?
Mitt Romney seems to have absolutely no interest in or knowledge of history or the forces that are changing the world. And he certainly has never expressed a long-term view of how he might hope to shape the world as president of the United States. Let’s face it, the guy is shallow.
Voters correctly want leaders with vision, because as the great baseball player Yogi Berra used to say: “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.”
3). The Romney-Ryan team has less experience in foreign policy than any two candidates for America’s top offices since World War II.
Barry Goldwater may have scared the bejesus out of many Americans, but at least he was a Lt. Colonel in the Army Air Corp during World War II and had served on the Armed Services Committee in the Senate.
When Senator Barack Obama ran for president, he chose the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joe Biden, as his running mate.
Collectively Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have zero foreign policy experience. And it shows.
4). Romney has demonstrated he has no capacity to empathize with other people. He has no idea how to put himself in their shoes — or even to understand how they hear the things he is saying. That’s one of the main reasons why, as Senator Kerry said at the Democratic Convention, Romney’s “foreign policy tour” earlier this summer was more like a “blooper reel.” It’s why, when it comes to foreign affairs, Romney is a bull in the china closet.
Romney seems incapable of understanding that when you’re asked about your opinion of preparations for the London Olympics in London days before the event, the Brits might be offended when (presumably to demonstrate how much he knew about running Olympic games) he questioned their readiness. He apparently had no clue that Palestinians might take offense when he said he thought that their economic problems stemmed from their “culture.”
Romney is typical of wealthy people who think they are very “cosmopolitan” because they can jet around the world and stay in first-class hotels, but don’t have a clue how normal people — or other cultures — experience the world. He is upper-class parochial. He thinks everyone thinks and talks and believes the same way as his classmates at prep school or colleagues in the Bain boardroom.
5). Romney has surrounded himself with many of the same neocon foreign policy advisers that got America into the horrific war in Iraq. One of those advisers, Richard Williamson, actually had the audacity to argue that “respect for America has gone down” under President Obama. Maybe in some parallel universe.
In fact, every international poll showed that George Bush, Dick Cheney and their neocon crew caused respect for the United States to plummet to new lows. And under President Obama respect for America and its values has massively increased. But then again, as the Romney campaign has made clear, they won’t allow their campaign to be governed by “fact checkers.”
If we needed reminding, this week made indelibly clear that a guy with no principles except his own ambition, and no vision whatsoever, will allow himself to be led around by the nose by the passionate Neo-Cons who want a restoration of the Bush-Cheney years. Romney’s performance should serve as a warning to all Americans: If you liked the Iraq War, you’ll love Mitt Romney’s foreign policy.
By: Robert Creamer, The Huffington Post, September 14, 2012
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