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Romney’s “Careful” and “Delicate” Incompetence on Foreign Policy

This must be some sort of joke: Mitt Romney has made a point of carefully picking the instances in which he challenges President Barack Obama’s management of foreign policy, reflecting the delicacy the Republican faces in taking on a commander in chief whose foreign policy marks are relatively high. Yes, the two words that immediately […]

This must be some sort of joke:

Mitt Romney has made a point of carefully picking the instances in which he challenges President Barack Obama’s management of foreign policy, reflecting the delicacy the Republican faces in taking on a commander in chief whose foreign policy marks are relatively high.

Yes, the two words that immediately spring to mind when I think of Romney’s foreign policy attacks are careful and delicate. Who can forget the care that Romney showed when he accused Obama of having “thrown Israel under the bus” when Obama restated longstanding U.S. policy, or the delicacy with which he denounced a widely-supported, uncontroversial arms control treaty as Obama’s “worst foreign policy mistake”? His attack on Obama’s dealings with China was so carefully done that he invited scorn from his own side because he had threatened to start a trade war. This reporter makes no effort to scrutinize Romney’s criticisms to determine if they have any merit.

Each and every time he has made a major foreign policy criticism, he has badly overreached, embarrassed himself, and demonstrated that his foreign policy agenda involves little more than repeating outdated talking points that he first used in No Apology. As the title of the book suggests, Romney’s attack on the imaginary “apology tour” has been at the heart of all of this, which epitomizes Romney’s disdain for the truth and his willingness to say anything if it gives him momentary credibility as a hard-line nationalist. Romney is possibly the least credible challenger to an incumbent on foreign policy in a generation, but one would never know that from reading this report.

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