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Perry’s Stale Foreign Policy

Perry's latest foreign policy remarks are tone-deaf and foolish.

Rick Perry urges us to fight the real enemy:

The nearest threat we face is not foreign in nature: it is from within. It is our own complacency. It is the view that events thousands of miles away are not our business. Or the view of cultural relativism that, while acknowledging the systematic savagery of the enemy, is also quick to point to the shortcomings of Western democracies. They’ve got bad guys over there, we’ve got a few of our own – what’s the difference? The attitudes I’m describing reflect a deep confusion, at a time when moral clarity is at a premium.

Perry said something similar to this on a recent trip to London earlier this month, which bizarrely prompted David Frum to declare that foreign policy was now Perry’s greatest advantage as a future presidential candidate. Having read Perry’s latest speech, I’m not sure how anyone could come to this conclusion. Perry seems to think that he has found a winning message by berating Americans for wanting to mind their own business and flinging stale charges of “cultural relativism,” but all of this strikes me as exceptionally tone-deaf and foolish.

There are many events around the world that aren’t any of our business. That has nothing to do with “complacency.” It is an acknowledgment that many international events don’t significantly affect or threaten the U.S. or our allies. Part of conducting a competent and responsible foreign policy is being able to understand that and to avoid being pulled into every crisis that shows up on the news. Criticizing one’s own government or society isn’t a sign of “cultural relativism.” On the contrary, it is an attempt to hold ourselves to a certain standard of conduct. That doesn’t mean that we trivialize or ignore far worse things done by other governments and organizations, but it does mean that we focus on the flaws that we can more readily fix here at home rather than throwing our resources away on trying to solve problems elsewhere that we don’t know how to fix.

What makes Perry’s foreign policy criticism especially tiresome is that he is so desperately trying to find parallels between the Cold War era and now to make his outdated foreign policy assumptions seem relevant:

Who can watch the unchecked Russian aggression toward Ukraine, and the annexation of Crimea, and not think of a different place in time, when Soviet tanks rolled through Prague, or when Soviet soldiers executed the blockade of West Berlin?

When you see extremists in Iran pursue nuclear weapons – weapons that could be used to hold hostage the interests of the West and Israel – are you not taken back to an earlier time when extremists stormed our embassy to take our fellow citizens hostage for 444 days?

When you see the military buildup of China, and the depletion of our own military forces, with a reduction in spending of 21 percent over four years, how can you not think of a previous era, soon after the end of the war in Vietnam, and wonder if we are not once again inviting threats to our interests at home and overseas by hollowing out our military forces?

In fact, it’s quite easy not to think of these things, since they aren’t all that comparable to current events. Viewing current events in these terms all but guarantees that Perry is misunderstanding them. That means he will wind up advocating for policies that may or may not have been appropriate forty or fifty years ago, but which are unsuited to a very different world. At best, Perry is reciting standard Republican boilerplate about the need for strength and “moral clarity,” which would confirm that he doesn’t have anything interesting to say. At worst, he genuinely believes that undesirable acts by other governments and groups happen because America is perceived as “weak” and won’t happen if the U.S. appears to be “strong.” That not only makes the U.S. responsible for things it can’t possibly control, but if taken seriously it would condemn the U.S. to having an overly militarized foreign policy and bloated military budget forever. Perry probably thinks that would be fine, which is why it he shouldn’t and almost certainly won’t ever be president.

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