Obama's Foreign Policy: It Sure Beats the Alternative Posted by Michael Cohen

As any regular reader of DA is well-aware I have not been a huge fan of President Obama's foreign policy to date. I like the START treaty, the effort to repair relations with key allies, the creation of the G-20 etc; but in general Obama has shown a bit too much timidity and too little follow through on issues like democracy promotion, reconfiguring the foreign policy bureaucracy and weaning the country away from the 'war on terror' narrative. But it's early, the political constraints on Obama are significant and so my general inclination is to withhold judgment for the time being. 

Unfortunately, however, what really makes me appreciate Obama's approach to foreign policy is America's opposition party and its apparent belief that American needs a foreign policy that looks not like George Bush's . . . but John Bolton's.

Case in point, Mitt Romney's factually inaccurate, insidious and generally stupid op-ed in the Washington Post yesterday about the START treaty. Fred Kaplan demolishes Romney's absurd arguments here, but I think Barron YoungSmith over at TNR gets to the heart of the issue:

The responsible Republican foreign policy establishment is not coming back. Mandarins like George Schultz, Henry Kissinger, and James Baker, who have all testified or written on behalf of the START treaty - calling it an integral, uncontroversial way of repairing the bipartisan arms-control legacy that sustained American foreign policy all the way up until the George W. Bush - are going to be dead soon (or they've drifted into the service of Democrats). The people who will take their place will be from a generation of superhawks, like John Bolton, Liz Cheney, and Robert Joseph, who are virulently opposed to the practice of negotiated arms control. 

As YoungSmith points out, Romney is not only running to the right of John McCain's rather conservative 2008 foreign policy platform it suggests that Republican presidential candidates are going to return to the Reagansque "peace through strength" mantra from the late 1970s. But it's actually even worse than that. Mitt Romney is a frontrunner for the 2012 GOP nomination and he seems to believe that the best way to win that nod is to stake out foreign policy positions that are basically Cheneyesque in nature - namely rejecting international diplomacy, viewing American power solely through the lens of our military might and calling for a foreign policy of American unilateralism. This is foreign policy for people who hark back to those halcyon days of 2001-2003 in US diplomatic relations. And for those who might be inclined to argue that this is just politics . . . well I say hark back to US diplomatic relations in 2001-2003. It WAS alive back then. 

The very fact that one of the GOP frontrunners for his party's presidential nomination believes that the START treaty is one of Obama's "worst foreign policy mistakes" and then runs to the op-ed page of the Washington Post to argue that pretty much every single prominent Republican and conservative thinker on national security is wrong on this issue. Well to me it's the best possible evidence that the Republican Party has become a political party of children with no serious interest in running the country's foreign affairs competently or effectively. 

Think of it in these terms; the Bush Administration's foreign policy was a complete disaster. But at least you had someone like Colin Powell in the first term and Bob Gates and Condi Rice (ish) in the second to keep the crazies in check. Who would play the role of Powell or Gates in a Romney, Huckabee or, god forbid, Palin Administration? Part of me wants to believe that this is just politics run amok (and I think some of that is at play here) but increasingly it should be apparent that GOP foreign policy thinking is dominated by a small group of extremist national security thinkers whose only lesson learned from the Bush Administration is that it wasn't conservative enough.

And while I sort of hate these types of political arguments . . . this all makes Obama look pretty good doesn't it?

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