Romney's Bonkers Foreign Policy

We old PostRight boys keep in touch with each other, so watch this space. In the meantime, and safely returned to the Motherland, our erstwhile Editor, Freddy Gray, writes:

What have we learnt about Willard Mitt Romney since he arrived in Britain? Not a lot. He’s a plonker, that’s for sure, but most of us knew that. The UK leg of his world tour will be remembered, if it is remembered at all, for the gaffes. And as Isabel suggested yesterday, Mitt’s diplomatic clumsiness is a real weak point in his candidacy. It’s not just silly slips, his foreign policy ideas seem positively bonkers. Last year, Romney and his neocon advisers published a white paper called An American Century. It talked of Turkey as if it were part of the axis of evil, rather than a member of Nato. It was eager to fear-monger about the rise of East, and proposed that America should arm Taiwan to combat China. At the same time, and even more bizarrely, Romney suggested that the US ought to ‘persuade China to commit to North Korea’s disarmament’.

In his campaign speeches, Romney talks as if war with Iran and China is inevitable. His worldview, or at least the one he promotes on his campaign, is that America rules, subtle diplomacy is for wusses, and any funny-sounding nation is probably an enemy of freedom. This is all posturing, of course. But that doesn’t stop it being dangerous as well as politically futile. In his Spectator cover essay last week, Jacob Heilbrunn suggested that Romney could win if he ran from the political centre and never stopped talking about the economy. On foreign affairs, he advised the Republican nominee to stay quiet. The killing of Osama Bin Laden and Obama’s fondness for drone strikes mean that the President cannot be cast as a wimp. And whatever one thinks of Obama, one can’t deny he has presence on the world stage. Romney, it is clear, does not. It might have been better for him to have stayed at home.