Romney’s Living in a Fantasy Land by Christopher Dickey

Romney’s foreign-policy speech was a dramatic throwback to the glory days of the Cold War. Unfortunately, it was mostly nonsense. Christopher Dickey pokes holes in the candidate’s vision.

When Mitt Romney gave his defining speech on foreign policy Monday, he showed he had a magnificent sense of history’s drama and almost no clue about its realities. But maybe that’s what passes for vision these days: using a simulacrum of the past to cobble together a fantasy about the present and the future.

The most striking and heartfelt theme, threaded all the way through the address in various guises, was a passionate longing for what are remembered as the glory days of the Cold War. Romney worked hard to turn the problems of the Middle East into a struggle against “darkness,” a matter of “democracy and despotism.” In this view, no politics are local, all is subsumed in a clash of civilizations. And for good measure Romney evidently longs to bring back the Russians as the Evil (if truncated and largely toothless) Empire. He’s going to build missile defenses no matter what old Vladimir Putin says about it. And, by the way, Romney says he’s going to build 15 new warships every year to keep such non-superpowers at bay.

Ah, for the days when the world was divided into good guys and bad guys, and we were not only good, we were great! And the bad guys lost and … well, never mind what happened after that.

Never mind that the enormous power, and the power to do enormous good, that the United States achieved under the Reagan, George
H. W. Bush, and Clinton administrations was pissed away under the presidency of George W. Bush. And never mind that the context for that, precisely, was that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney wanted to lead the United States in a new fight against a new Evil Empire. As Bush said, “You are either with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld talked of “a long twilight struggle,” when what he should have said was endless shadow boxing.

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/10/09/romney-s-living-in-a-fantasy-land.html