Noah Millman continues the discussion on what we can know about Romney and Obama’s future foreign policy. I want to draw attention to these sentences near the end:

I’m saying that making promises you don’t intend to keep is an index of bad character. Bush Jr. was right not to go to war over Georgia. But his Administration gave every indication that it was willing to back the Georgian government up in its confrontation with Russia, a reckless promise that had to be broken. That showed back character. We have every reason to believe that Romney will make reckless promises with respect to how he will handle Iran. We don’t know whether he’ll keep them.

As the war in Georgia showed, making promises that you can’t keep is also very dangerous to the people to whom the promise is being made. Bush administration officials have always maintained that they tried to discourage Saakashvili from using force in South Ossetia, but their frequent gestures of rhetorical support for Georgia’s NATO aspirations and their provision of military aid created confusion about how far the U.S. was willing to go in support of Georgian claims. As late as the summer of 2008, Saakashvili interpreted the administration’s position as a “flashing amber light” that opened the door to the use of force. The problem in that case was that administration officials made their warnings against the use of force only privately, while their public statements were entirely supportive. As Thomas de Waal explained in The Caucasus:

The United States in particular gave many confusing signals. The fact that U.S. troops were there supposedly to train Georgian troops for peacekeeping and antiterrorism functions, not for combat against Abkhaz and South Ossetia, was a distinction lost on most observers, including most Georgians. When Bush said on Freedom Square in Tbilisi in May 2005, “The path of freedom you have chosen is not easy but you will not travel it alone,” he had not meant it literally. (p. 223)

Bush’s record on Georgia is yet another reminder of what sort of disaster can result from making what another party believes to be promises of support that the U.S. has no intention of keeping in a crisis. One danger on Iran policy in Romney’s case is that a future Israeli government would interpret Romney’s rhetoric of not allowing “one inch of space” between the U.S. and Israel as a pledge to provide automatic U.S. support for whatever action the Israeli leadership decides to take.