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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Romney and the Hawkish “Leadership” Fetish

For Romney, America "must lead" even if "leading" means taking on enormous costs unrelated to our security.
mitt romney world affairs

Mitt Romney is predictably agitating for the U.S. to do more in the war on ISIS:

We must wage the war to defeat the enemy, not merely to harass it. For over a year, the president has clung to the hope that an air campaign is sufficient. It demonstrably is not. He must call in the best military minds from the United States and NATO, actually listen to what they have to say and finally construct a comprehensive strategy that integrates our effort with the Kurds, Turks, Saudis, Egyptians and Jordanians.

Romney’s article is a good example of the sort of foreign policy argument he used during the presidential campaign: long on vehement denunciations of administration policy and ambitious declarations of what “must” be done and extremely short on explanations of how his preferred policy would work in practice. All that Romney does here is to endorse the administration’s stated goal of “destroying” ISIS, says that the president should listen to “the best military minds,” and then name-checks a series of allies, clients, and quasi-proxies that should be included in the effort. Romney insists that the U.S. needs to do more, and goes on to say that U.S. “leadership means being willing to devote whatever resources are required to win — even boots on the ground.”

There is no attempt to weigh the potential costs or what consequences might follow from the ground war he is proposing, but then with Romney there never has been. America “must lead” even if “leading” means taking on enormous costs unrelated to our security. There is just the usual fetishization of “leading” and willingness to endorse military escalation regardless of the circumstances that we have come to expect from him and others like him.

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