My column on Romney’s Citadel foreign policy address for The Week is online. Here is an excerpt:

At times, Romney’s speech sounded like a technocrat’s brief for divinely-ordained U.S. hegemony: “God did not create this country to be a nation of followers. America is not destined to be one of several equally balanced global powers. America must lead the world, or someone else will.” It seems presumptuous at best to claim knowledge of God’s foreign policy preferences, but the most misleading statement here is that another state will assume the role of a global hegemon if the U.S. does not fill it. There is no one state or group of states aspiring to the international role that the U.S. currently has, and no other is capable of filling that role if it wished.

Probably the most remarkable thing in the speech was how little Romney paid to the other major powers in the world. He poses some questions about future scenarios in the beginning of the speech, but he never answers any of them. Today’s speech lifted quite a few arguments that Romney had already made two years ago in a speech at the Heritage Foundation. The main difference is that the “nations or groups of nations” he identified as the main international threats back then have now become threatening “forces.” There’s nothing the matter with recycling his own material, but it is still bad material.