For a President Romney – A Foreign Policy
Preview – Just Follow the Benjamins!
Blessed are the people whose leaders can look
destiny in the eye without flinching but also without attempting to play
God.
– Henry A. Kissinger
By J.M. Hamilton (10-21-12)
President Obama appeared at the second debate and conquered.
And just as J.M.H. awarded the first debate to Mr. Romney, equally clear
is that the President won the second debate. Debate three, which is on
foreign policy, should easily place President Obama ahead of Mr. Romney, two debates
out of three. After all, no President, since the fall of the Berlin wall,
has done more to protect the American people, and look out for U.S. long
term national security interests.
The list of President Obama’s foreign policy achievements are well
known to all. And here, it is best to view the Presidents accolades
through the prism of a Bush (W) Presidency. Why? Because a Romney
Presidency’s foreign policy is very likely to be a Bush redux, one
characterized by chasing the Benjamins and myopia. So here we go:
President Bush started two major wars on the heals of 9-11, and
unlike his father, both were poorly executed, suffered from mission drift, and
metastasized into nation building exercises.
President Obama started no wars, and has, or is in the process of,
winding down two wars without loss of U.S. face, so nation building can begin
in earnest, here in the United States.
President Bush’s primary “objectives” in starting two wars was to
capture Al Qaeda leadership, preemptively stop the spread of weapons of mass
destructions, and foster democracy. He did not achieve the first two
goals, and only time will tell if democracy will take hold in both Iraq and
Afghanistan.
President Obama is not only responsible for decimating much of Al
Qaeda leadership, but via special forces, knocked off OBL, the nation’s arch
nemesis. Without starting a major ground war, democracy is flowering and
spreading throughout the middle-east. To President Obama’s credit, he did
not stand in the way of these popular pro-democracy movements, when the
temptation to practice real politik and support existing dictatorships must
have been great (see below).
Messrs. Bush and Cheney, under the premise that President Reagan
proved that deficits don’t matter, were fiscally irresponsible, and paid for
their wars with a credit card.
President Obama, from the party of budgetary conservatism (see Mr.
Clinton’s budget surpluses), did the fiscally responsible thing, by ending two
wars. President Obama has not declared a “peace dividend,” and DOD
spending continues at a responsible pace.
The spear tip of President Bush’s and the Republican Party’s
foreign policy appears rooted in the 20th Century, with costly standing armies,
ground campaigns, and expensive weapons systems, too often fraught with failure
and cost overruns.
President Obama has shown us how the martial efforts of the 21st
Century are likely to center around less costly and life saving: cyber
offensives, stealth technology, robotics and drones, and specials forces.
Of equal importance to the aforementioned, President Bush
“cowboy-ed” foreign policy, often thumbing his nose at the world and the U.N.
In essence, doing the very thing that Mr. Kissinger warned against, by
playing God.
President Obama, no hostage to world opinion, often works with and
through U.S. allies to conduct foreign policy (see the take down Col. Gaddafi,
yet another GOP goal – achieved by this President). As opposed to
launching a military strike, Iran’s economy is now in shambles as a result of
global sanctions – initiated by the Obama administration – and Iran is now
coming to the negotiation table over their nuclear program.
The fact that Mr. Romney’s principle complaint against the
administration centers around Benghazi shows how much trouble the GOP is in on
an issue they used to own, foreign policy. Ambassador Steven’s death is a tragedy, but hardly an unexpected
event in any American outpost in the middle-east. And in fact, thanks to house
Republican efforts to cut back on security spending for our global outposts, we
might expect more of the same in the future. That said President Obama,
and Secretary of State Clinton, did what any true leader would do, they
accepted responsibility. I may have missed it, but I don’t recall Mr.
Bush taking responsibility for his set backs in the middle-east.
Meanwhile, Mr. Romney’s recent global adventures were fraught with tongue
entanglements – of his own making. Whether it was insulting the British,
or offending both tribes in Israeli society, a President Romney might just
cause global inflammation, or calamity, by an inadvertent utterance.
So if past is prologue, and with the GOP candidate surrounded by
neo-cons with itchy trigger fingers, what might we expect from Mr. Romney?
Well lets follow the Benjamins, shall we:
1) Mr. Sheldon Adelson, this campaign season, has showered
the GOP with a hundred million dollars and counting. Mr. Adelson’s pet
project is the State of Israel, a worthy U.S. ally and a great country.
However, there are some instances, no matter how rare, where U.S. foreign
policy will not, and should not, coincide with Israel’s interests and
objectives. And yet, candidate Romney has basically intimated, if not
stated, that his administration would surrender U.S. sovereignty, by
subcontracting out middle-east foreign policy to the State of Israel. If
that’s Mr. Romney’s thinking, how much resistance is he going to give, when
merited, to a phone call from Mr. Adelson? A Romney presidency almost
guarantees another war in the middle-east, or certainly increases the
probability.
2) Campaign contributions, and lobbying, from the Defense
Industry runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars, per opensecrets.org.
Much of this money is directed to the GOP, which goes a long way towards
explaining why Candidate Romney is calling on spending an extra two trillion on
defense over the next ten years. The GOP’s new found fiscal conservatism
applies to social spending and entitlements (those programs favoring the 47%),
but when it comes to defense, the sky is the limit, even when the DOD doesn’t
find the extra two trillion necessary. The problem is, with all that
money allocated to “defense,” it makes it that much easier to go imperial or on
the “offensive,” particularly with a White House full of neocons. With
the U.S. spending more on defense than the entire G-20 combined, and with the
GOP being self-described fiscal hawks, one would think a Romney administration
would want to root out DOD waste and fraud – and go “private equity” on
the military establishment – before running up higher national debt to
support same… but apparently not. With a Romney administration count on
more profligate “borrow and spend” Republican policies, in regards foreign
policy and DOD spending, at the expense of this nation and the middle class.
3) Being incredibly naive, I believed for many years that
our foreign policy and DOD were all about spreading peace, love, understanding
and democracy. After all it was the U.S.A.F.’s Strategic Air Command that
had the motto, “Peace if our profession;” but as I have learned more recently,
the role of the DOD is really to protect markets and the multi-national interests
of the Fortune 500 around the globe. Which helps to explain why a
political party, the GOP, that is allegedly pro-democracy, is all fired up
about the recent drift in the middle-east toward democratic regimes. You
see it is much easier, in many instance, for corporations to deal with a
dictatorship, and the irregularities of one man show, then it is to deal with
hundreds of duly elected legislators and politicians. Besides there is no
assurance that just because a country goes democratic that they are going
embrace a capitalist economy… they just might go socialist, renegotiate
contracts concerning national resources with foreign companies, and they might
even nationalize entire industries. Never a pretty prospect, which helps
to explain why the U.S. has supported dictatorships for so long, at the expense
of foreign countries and their citizens; and why the GOP is on Obama’s back
over the spread of Democracy in the middle-east, billions of dollars in
corporate revenue may be at stake.
The GOP appears to believe that democracy in the U.S. is good,
while democracy in foreign resource rich lands is potentially bad. Look
for a President Romney to be less supportive of some of these pro-democracy
movements for the aforementioned reasons, and many others. That is to
say, a President Romney is not unlikely to be pro-dictatorship, which is
extremely short sighted for the U.S. and U.S. corporate interests.
Given the state of our present economy as a result of the GOP’s
thirty year reign, foreign policy doesn’t get the attention it deserves, but
our economy and foreign policy are deeply interconnected. The fact that
the nation has an all volunteer military, no national draft, and no sense of
shared sacrifice, as wars – at least as run by the GOP – are now paid for with
debt, means that foreign policy often gets short shrift from the electorate.
But this is an area that very much deserves every American’s attention,
as the foreign policy of the candidate we elect impacts our standing in the
world, our national debt and economy, and the women and men who lay their lives
down for us all.
Clearly, President Obama has shown he is the better candidate for
our nation’s foreign policy, and its impact on our national economy.
President Obama is more closely aligned to President Reagan’s foreign
policy, who did not engage America in war – during his two terms in
office. Today’s GOP is both bellicose, plagued by myopia, and geared
towards battle, all too often at the expense or our economy and national
security.
God Bless our fighting men and women and our Commander in Chief!
Copyright JM Hamilton Publishing 2013
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