It’s funny how former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney used to be a pretty centrist Republican candidate, frequently reaching across party lines in his governorship and even instituting a state-run health-care plan that is the only government plan in American moderately successful in extending coverage without ballooning costs. However, Romney the Gubernational Candidate seems to lean so far right he might be in danger of falling off the cliff into Glenn Beck territory. Exhibit A: his recent Washington Post op-ed blasting Obama’s relatively noncontroversial new START treaty limiting use of nuclear arms. Let’s go through it, shall we?
He starts off by lambasting every single one of Obama’s foreign policy initiatives. It reveals a neoconservative standpoint in which every single concession to “the enemy” represents the possibility that bombs will start falling on U.S soil the very next day. So Gaza’s been firing rockets into Israel, North Korea sank a warship, and Honduras’ socialist president was reinstated- so what? Just because an unfriendly regime acts up doesn’t mean that the U.S. is going to be invaded tomorrow. Unfortunately, what he doesn’t understand is that American can’t get involved militarily at once- Bush Jr.’s tenure has shown the disastrous consequences of trying to be the world’s police force.
And that was just the introduction. His “analysis” of the START treaty contains as many “gotcha” moments as CNN interviews do in Sarah Palin’s mind. Many of Romney’s accusations are completely pointless and irrelevant, and seem appropriate more for a paranoid schizophrenic than for a potential candidate for the President of the United States.
His problem with the START treaty rests on one issue and one issue only- the “abandonment” of a missile defense system in Europe against the Russians. For just that issue, he’s willing to overlook the significant reduction in the nuclear arsenal of Russian and the U.S. as well as the benefits greater cooperation between the two former foes would bring- the latest round of Iran sanctions would not have happened without Russia agreeing. The saddest part is that he completely neglects to mention that Obama has kept a scaled-down version of the defense shield- one that was supported by both Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, military people who are still concerned about the national security threat of gay American soldiers.
But that’s not the most telling part- that would lie in Romney calling the START treaty “Obama’s greatest foreign-policy mistake”, over his handling of the Israeli-Palestine crisis, two Middle Eastern wars, and a million other engagements that the U.S. is involved in that has more significance that limiting warheads that will never be used. Treating Russia as the “enemy” reflects Romney’s troubling inability to think beyond the Cold War. Romney and other neoconservatives are making the same mistakes as the notorious French military back in the World Wars: they are preparing for the last war. With attacks on the U.S. more likely to occur by infiltration than open warfare, passenger than military planes, and by Islamic extremists than Russia, we need a President who’s willing to fight by the rules of modern warfare, not pine for the good ol’ days of mutually assured destruction by nuke.
