"If Mitt Romney wins the presidency, it is in foreign policy that his mettle will be tested," Llewellyn King wrote recently for Hearst Newspapers.
Here are excerpts from opinion columns exploring U.S. foreign policy:Western European allyAs a businessman, Romney must know that the first thing you do in a new company is to take inventory. Despite the bellicosity of his rhetoric, he needs to take inventory and to act on what he finds.One of those findings ought to be that his success in international relations will be determined as much by his relations with Western Europe as by the big, new U.S. Navy (three more submarines and more destroyers)....Western Europe prejudges American presidents on what it believes they think. This turned out to be a harsh and unfair judgment of Ronald Reagan and of George H.W. Bush, and close to right about George W. Bush.Though Europe may be in a state of economic extremis, it will be essential to the success of the next U.S. presidency.Read more-- Llewellyn King, for Hearst NewspapersAdult discussion of LibyaMany stupid things have been said by people who should have known better in the month since the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.The raid -- in which heavily armed men with suspected links to al Qaeda killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three American personnel -- is being portrayed by some Republicans as an event approaching the attacks of Sept. 11 in importance, and by some Democrats as an unfortunate little mishap that says absolutely nothing about President Barack Obama's competence and credibility, or about the state of the American war on al Qaeda and its affiliates.The attack could have been used to teach various useful lessons about al Qaeda's resilience, about human fallibility, about the limits of security and the imprecision of intelligence. Instead, in this pathologically politicized climate, our national leadership is most interested in identifying scapegoats to fire and points to score in advance of elections next month. Read more-- Jeffrey Goldberg, Bloomberg ViewGOP's Truman embraceOne of the hardy staples of neoconservative rhetoric is to invoke a golden age of foreign policy.This was an era, so we are told, when Democratic presidents were respected by Republicans for pursuing a tough foreign policy that vanished after the Vietnam War transformed them into a bunch of cowering wussbags.Exhibit A is Harry Truman, the Democratic president who first waged the Cold War and oversaw the creation of NATO.So Mitt Romney was right on script during his Oct. 8 speech at the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) when he extolled Truman's secretary of state, George Marshall...."We have seen this struggle before. It would be familiar to George Marshall. In his time, in the ashes of world war, another critical part of the world was torn between democracy and despotism. Fortunately, we had leaders of courage and vision, both Republicans and Democrats, who knew that America had to support friends who shared our values and prevent today's crises from becoming tomorrow's conflicts."This is nostalgic flapdoodle....The charges that are being lodged against President Barack Obama -- that he is a supine and feckless appeaser of China, Russia and America's Islamist adversaries -- were once advanced against Truman, only he was supposed to be a supine and feckless appeaser only of the first two.Read more-- Jacob Heilbrunn, in Foreign PolicyHave more to add? News tip? Tell us
