Over at the American Conservative, Daniel Larison is working overtime trying to keep Mitt Romney honest on foreign policy, searching his speeches for errors:
“Greg Scoblete finds another untrue statement in Romney’s foreign policy speech from last week,” Dan announces excitedly, in his latest post.
Dan, let me save you some trouble. In each Mitt Romney foreign policy speech, there is one, and only one, true statement. That statement is “Hi, I’m Mitt Romney.” The rest is jive. What Romney is selling is foreign policy as morality play, good guys versus the bad guys. Comparing what Romney says with the “real world” is ridiculous, because no correspondence with that world is intended. Remember Marx’s line about history repeating itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce? Well, this is the farce part.
Meanwhile, over at Foreign Policy, James Traub assays the mighty task of holding all the Republican candidates’ feet to the fire. Things do get toasty, but I can’t help feeling that Jim burns himself worse than he does the candidates, because Jim, though he can’t quite come out and say it, obviously longs for the good old days when foreign policy was king, when Doub-Ya promised to spread democracy all around the globe. These new guys, they don’t seem to realize how many enemies we have out there. It’s not a time for “Less,” it’s time for “More.” It’s always time for “More.” If we haven’t found new enemies, it’s because we haven’t been looking hard enough!
Where’s the rub? Here’s the rub: “Years of slaughter in Iraq and the demoralizing stalemate in Afghanistan have increasingly convinced Americans of both parties that there is little good the United States can do in the world,” remarks Jim, with an all but audible sigh. Which might suggest that foreign policy geniuses like Jim, who egged Bush on to administer the worst self-inflicted wounds in American history, not to mention visiting death, disruption and misery to tens of millions of human beings around the globe, were more interested in promoting their own careers than in, you know, helping humanity.
