Mitt Romney's alarmist foreign policy: Bush redux?

The GOP presidential frontrunner offers a major policy address full of straw men, rhetorical relics, and shameless dishonesty

Daniel Larison

On Friday at The Citadel, Mitt Romney repeated his critique of administration foreign policy in a speech titled "An American Century." As usual, his attacks rang hollow. Romney's vision for America's role in the world continues to be distorted by an unwillingness to adapt to the world as it is, and it relies heavily on a nostalgic appeal to the pre-eminence that the U.S. enjoyed in the second half of the 20th century. Nothing could be more harmful to identifying and securing real American interests than an attempt to recapture lost prestige and power that are not returning.

"In an American Century, America leads the free world and the free world leads the entire world," Romney said, assigning America with an outdated role that has no relationship to the present. "The free world" was at least a useful phrase for framing opposition to the Soviet Union during the Cold War, but now it is no more than a rhetorical relic. There are far more free countries today, and many of them chart their own courses that serve their respective national interests. If Romney insists on trying to lead the "free world," many of the rising democratic powers today are not going to follow.

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Daniel Larison has a Ph.D. in history and is a contributing editor at The American Conservative. He also writes on the blog Eunomia.