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The Pointless Foreign Excursions of Our Presidential Candidates

We should stop pretending that brief foreign excursions give novices any meaningful foreign policy experience
Foreign_Secretary_with_Governor_Mitt_Romney_(7649338238)

Ed Luce identifies some problems with the regular pilgrimage of aspiring presidential candidates to London:

Yet there is something lazy about London’s place on the itinerary. It is true that other countries — notably Israel and sometimes Germany — also feature. But London is automatic. The next president will inherit a very different world to that bequeathed by George W Bush. It will be multipolar and complicated. Countries like China and India are shaping events. It would be encouraging were New Delhi and Beijing occasionally to make it on to the itinerary.

I take Luce’s point here, but there is another reason why our would-be candidates’ ritual travel abroad has become more tiresome in recent years. It would be one thing if these visits produced somewhat better-informed candidates with a sharper understanding of the relevant issues, but that almost never happens. Because the risks of appearing clueless on foreign policy are so great for would-be presidential candidates, they now go through the motions of these overseas visits without appearing to gain very much from them. The candidates that might stand to benefit the most from direct experience overseas are the ones that usually get the least out of these experiences, since it is first and foremost viewed as a box-checking exercise rather than an opportunity to become more familiar with the rest of the world. Frankly, it doesn’t interest me whether a candidate travels to another country while he’s running for higher office. I’d like to have some confidence that he already knew a fair amount about the rest of the world before he started running for president. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case with a lot of our would-be presidents, and jaunts to foreign capitals can’t fix that.

Candidates that know little or nothing about foreign policy before their visits come away knowing scarcely any more than before they left, and yet our bar for “foreign policy credentials” in a candidate nowadays is so low that simply traveling to another country allows these candidates to clear it. Since these trips have become little more than glorified photo-ops, they are mostly a waste of everyone’s time. I’m not sure whether politicians will ever want to break this habit, but it would help if the rest of us stop pretending that these brief excursions give novices any meaningful foreign policy experience.

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