The difference between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney is not solely a matter of policy or priorities. The difference is about something far more fundamental and significant to the lives of every American. It is a difference of world views.
If you want to know how Mitt Romney views the world, you need not focus on the train wreck that was his recent junket to England, Israel, and Poland. True, the former governor’s first foray into foreign affairs gave Americans a glimpse of what a Romney presidency would look like to the rest of the world. The results were not encouraging. In England, Romney managed to alienate nearly the entire British people by questioning their preparedness for the Olympics. In Israel, he delivered a shockingly ignorant speech in which he blamed the massive disparity in GDP between Israel and Palestine not on forty years of Israeli military occupation but on “cultural differences.” In Poland, Romney was denounced and boycotted by the party of his host, Lech Walesa, because of his assaults on American labor unions. These foibles and many others led the political editor of London’s Daily Mail, James Chapman, to tweet: “Do we have a new Dubya on our hands?” Chapman may not realize how right he may be. Indeed, the true revelation of Romney’s world view did not come during his disastrous trip oversees. It came before he left US soil.
On the eve of his departure, Romney gave a much-anticipated speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFA), laying out for the first time his foreign policy philosophy. In that speech, Romney described his vision for America on the global stage by using a term that has become so toxic, so outmoded, so universally proven to be a dangerous, self-destructive, and intellectually bankrupt expression of the global order, that until Romney revived it in his remarks at the VFA, most Americans assumed they would never hear it again. Romney called for a new “American century.”
This phrase should sound familiar to anyone who was not living under a rock for the last decade. It is the manifesto of the thankfully defunct neoconservative think tank The Project for the New American Century (PNAC), whose promotion of a unipolar world dominated by America’s untrammeled military might was wholeheartedly adopted by the George W. Bush administration. The result? A catastrophic war in Iraq. An ill-conceived war on terror. The erosion of American civil liberties. The loss of American influence across the world. Hundreds of thousands of lives lost overseas, and trillions upon trillions of dollars of debt at home. That is the legacy of the new American century. And it is the legacy that Mitt Romney seems all too eager to revive, which may explain why fifteen of the twenty-two people on Romney’s foreign policy team worked for George W. Bush. Six of whom were members of PNAC.
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