Foreign entanglements

By Mustang Bobby

Mitt Romney gave what his campaign billed as a "major foreign policy speech" on Monday at VMI. Apparently the definition of "major" is the same shit George W. Bush did but with better hair, and the same hawkish rhetoric that killed thousands of Americans for no other reason than political advantage:

The essence of Mr. Romney's argument is that he would take the United States back to an earlier era, one that would result, as his young foreign policy director, Alex Wong, told reporters on Sunday, in "the restoration of a strategy that served us well for 70 years."

But beyond his critique of Mr. Obama as failing to project American strength abroad, Mr. Romney has yet to fill in many of the details of how he would conduct policy toward the rest of the world, or to resolve deep ideological rifts within the Republican Party and his own foreign policy team. It is a disparate and politely fractious team of advisers that includes warring tribes of neoconservatives, traditional strong-defense conservatives and a band of self-described "realists" who believe there are limits to the degree the United States can impose its will.

Over the last seventy years, the strategy "that served us well" got us into four wars — Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq — none of which ended with the desired outcome for America or, for that matter, the people in the countries involved. For America, it meant spending trillions of dollars on a perilous arms race with the Russians and a Cold War that threatened to turn into thermonuclear war fifty years ago this month.

So far, our foreign policy under the banner of American Macho Butch Patrol has been an abject failure. And Mr. Romney wants to continue on that winning way.

As Michael notes: "Stupid. Ignorant. Dangerous."

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)