Mitt Romney's reaction to recent events overseas should not be viewed as a gaffe. They are an excellent illustration of the way Mitt Romney and his neoconservative policy advisers view the world, which is fundamentally different from the way liberals look at the world.
In brief, liberals view the world as a global neighborhood where diplomacy is used to amicably resolve disputes among equals, and where force is reserved for preventing harm when diplomacy has already failed.
Neoconservatives view the world the way a bully views the playground. There are no sovereigns with equal rights, there are only objects to use for one's own interests. Diplomacy means threatening to beat people up if they don't surrender their lunch money, and force is acceptable "as a last resort!" any time "diplomacy" as thus defined fails to get other people to give up and do what we tell them to.
The fundamental beliefs that an administration brings to the table are likely to prejudge the decisions that that administration makes in time of stress. With the same fundamental worldview as the Bush administration (not to mention many advisers recycled from the Bush administration...) we can expect a repeat of many of the same mistakes. Especially since they still don't see them as mistakes.
Let's take a look, shall we? (more...)
Washington Post:
âThereâs a pretty compelling story that if you had a President Romney, youâd be in a different situation,â Richard Williamson, a top Romney foreign policy adviser, said in an interview. âFor the first time since Jimmy Carter, weâve had an American ambassador assassinated.â
Williamson added, âIn Egypt and Libya and Yemen, again demonstrations â the respect for America has gone down, thereâs not a sense of American resolve and we canât even protect sovereign American property.â
The aggressive approach by Romneyâs campaign thrust the issue of foreign policy to the forefront of the presidential campaign a day after the Republican candidate was widely criticized for blasting Obama while U.S. embassies in Egypt and Libya were under attack.
Attacks overseas happen not because foreigners are angry, or because terrorists are using us as the global bogeyman that they need to defend Islam from. Attacks happen because Obama is weak, and weakness invites attack.
Never mind the obvious contradiction of numerous truly weak nations that are not being attacked, let's look at the fundamental assumptions behind the logic here.
1) The enemy.
In this view, the world is full of people who want to kill us, and the only thing stopping them is fear of retribution. Yes, such people do exist. But they are few in number. And unlike al-Qaida, who obviously are not deterred by fear of retribution, they are not significant military threats. There are few people in the world who, undeterred by armed drones and a president willing to use them, will be deterred by the undead maggoty-eyed gaze of Zombie Reagan. Yet to swallow the conservative line of argument, you must believe that our enemies aren't intimidated by the most powerful military in the world, but they will be intimidated by heated windy bluster coming from the white house.
2) Us and them.
The world is either with us, or with the terrorists. As noted above, the best way to convince undecided parties to choose our side is "strength," meaning loudly denouncing and threatening them. This is effective because those people are cowards and will ignore insults to their national or religious dignity if they feel sufficiently threatened.
Diplomacy is unnecessary and counterproductive, because asking other countries for their support will give them the sense that they are free to deny it, which amounts to weakness on our part, which makes us less safe.
3) Less than war.
Since those people are cowards, they will back down in the face of a threat, even when the means we're threatening them with can't hurt them more than they are already suffering. This means that we never need to actually fight wars, we just need to express exactly the right threats to them. When soldiers die in wars, it's the failure of their leaders -- not in failing to avoid the war, but in failing to get the enemy to give up without a fight.
4) Respect for America.
Again, since those other people are cowards, the only thing they understand is force. Force makes America strong and respected. Anything that might undermine force -- domestic dissent, human rights protections, a free press, democracy itself -- is a weakening force and leads America to be less respected.
5) Local politics.
Democracy is us, we're indispensable, and if we go down democracy goes with us.
The success of other democracies, and especially fledgling proto-democracies, is a question of American resolve, not a question of the local population's willingness to commit to sharing power
Democracy is only valid if it produces results favorable to the United States, since we are the godfather of democracy. Consider the argument that it's better to defend the supremacy of the Roman clergy even when they happen to be pedophiles, because they're God's true agents and if they go down we are all doomed to hell. In a similar sense, the supremacy of United States interests should never be threatened by the outcomes of elections in other countries.
6) War as a last resort
America is entitled in getting whatever it wants in the world. After all, running a global protection racket is expensive, so we're entitled to help ourselves to a few crates of loot now and then to lighten our burden. War is a terrible, tragic thing and should only be used as a last resort -- in other words, only beat people up if there's no other way to get their lunch money.
7) Reality itself.
As Karl Rove emphasized, reality is created by history's actors. All they need is sufficient force and the will to use it. Which I suppose is true, although it's not necessarily possible to predict how much force will be sufficient or how many people will die in the process.
Conclusion:
I consider the above to be the neoliberal view of foreign policy. However, it seems to be the only view of foreign policy that has any traction at all in the Republican Party, due to condemnation of every other point of view by Rush Limbaugh, and adoption by every republican who supported the actions of the Bush administration. In other words, the neoconservative view is held by a far larger clique than those usually called the neoconservatives.
These people still believe that the Iraq war was a good idea, that the Arab spring was a bad idea, that we can replace democracy with sham regimes that may hold elections but don't represent their people, that we can replace diplomacy with bullying, and that acknowledging soldiers or even providing them with body armor is less important than making sure the pentagon has weapons systems they don't even want.
These people are dangerous. Let's keep them away from power.