by Mitt Romney
Such lavish praise for Obama—by Messrs. Castro, Chávez, and Qaddafi—tells you much of what his approach to foreign policy is and the audience to which he is playing.
If President Obama has won the praise of America’s enemies, he has too often turned his back on America’s allies. This has happened in Eastern Europe, where he shelved President Bush’s plan to build a missile defense shield in Poland and the Czech Republic in order to reset our relations with Russia, without even advance warning to our allies, and without receiving any concession in return. This was understandably seen as a betrayal by our allies in Eastern Europe. The result was, in the words of the syndicated columnist and commentator Charles Krauthammer:
an earthquake in our relations with Eastern Europe and the beginning of their detachment from the American umbrella. . . . We have now declared that Eastern Europe—which had assumed that after the Cold War [it] had joined the West indissolubly and would enjoy its protection—is now in many ways on its own, subject to Russian hegemony and pressure.
Poles need to review our view of America, said Lech Walesa, the hero of Solidarity who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983. We must first of all take care of our business.
Something similar is happening with Israel, where President Obama has exerted substantial pressure on Israel to stop its settlements while putting almost no pressure on the Palestinians. He has done this despite the fact that Israel is among America’s greatest allies, a true and faithful friend, one that has made real sacrifices for peace. To take just one example: In 2005, Israel evacuated its settlers and handed over the Gaza strip and part of the West Bank to the Palestinians. This unilateral concession on the part of Israel was met in return by thousands of rockets fired into the cities of Israel. The Palestinians, fully aware that President Obama is pressuring Israel to make even more unilateral concessions, are content to sit back and make no concessions of any kind.
In our own hemisphere, President Obama has insisted that Manuel Zelaya, the corrupt autocrat who has allied himself with Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro and who was lawfully removed from office by the Honduran Supreme Court, must be returned to power. It is stunning to think that the president of the United States would force Honduras to act contrary to its own laws in order to restore a repressive, anti-American leader to power. Yet that is precisely what the Obama administration has demanded.
When it comes to Colombia—one of our best allies in the Western Hemisphere, a nation that has assisted us in fighting against both terrorists and the drug cartel, and an important counterweight to the ambitions of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela—President Obama has done nothing to promote a free trade agreement that is vital to Bogotá.
This is the very opposite of the multilateralism candidate Obama promised throughout 2008—and the effects of his actions on our allies will be to create incentives for them to cut deals with our adversaries.
If President Obama has too often undermined American allies, he has too often sought to placate America’s adversaries, including Iran and North Korea. In doing so, the president has shown weakness and irresolution when he needs to demonstrate strength of will. President Obama sends a signal that he is eager to negotiate at any time, any place, without conditions; the effect of this is to cede all of the power and leverage to our enemies. Time and again, President Obama’s open hand has been met with a clenched fist.
Compounding all this is the president’s reluctance to speak out with confidence for American ideals abroad—to carry on the tradition begun by Harry Truman with a rhetorical lineage extending all the way back to our Founding era: While he will occasionally say a good word on behalf of democracy and human rights, there is no passion in his words—and he has not made them a priority anywhere in the world. The president’s support for liberty appears to be pro forma and mechanical, as if it is an afterthought. And President Obama’s refusal to meet with the Dalai Lama, along with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s admission that human rights are a secondary issue in our dealings with China, have simply reinforced this impression. The impassioned appeals for democracy that were heard from Democrats like Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy have been replaced by rote words or by silence. It is an extraordinary moment we are in, when an American president is eager to note all of America’s failings, real and perceived, and reluctant to speak out in defense of American values and America’s contributions to the freedoms enjoyed around the globe.
Another of President Obama’s presuppositions is that America is in a state of inevitable decline. He seems to believe that we have entered the post-American world predicted by Fareed Zakaria’s best-selling book of that name. The perspective is shared by many in the foreign policy cognoscenti, and apparently by the president himself. He therefore sees his task as somehow managing that decline, making the transition to post-superpower status as smooth as possible, helping Americans understand and adjust to their new circumstances.
Among the dangers is that if a president believes this, it is likely to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. A commander in chief ’s defense budget and security commitments will be based on a set of assumptions that will eventually become reality. If the president accepts that America is in an irreversible state of decline relative to the rest of the world, it may well come to pass under his stewardship.
President Obama is far too gifted a politician to say in plain words that America is merely one nation among many. But his rhetoric offers clues into his thinking. For example, while in Europe, he dismissed FDR and Churchill’s dominant role at Bretton Woods, saying, If there’s just Roosevelt and Churchill sitting in a room with a brandy, that’s an easier negotiation. But that’s not the world we live in, and it shouldn’t be the world that we live in [emphasis added].
It has expressed itself in President Obama’s insistence that there is no senior partner and no junior partner in our relations with Europe—meaning Luxembourg and Andorra carry the same weight and influence in world affairs as the United States and Great Britain (a claim even Andorrans and citizen of Luxembourg would probably reject).
And it has expressed itself when, in response to a question about whether he believed in American exceptionalism—a phrase that indicates America has a special place and role in the world—he replied, I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism. Which is another way of saying he doesn’t believe it at all.
Nowhere has the president’s radical reworking of American and Western leadership been more obviously on display than in his address to the United Nations in September 2009. The heart of his remarks came in this passage:
In an era when our destiny is shared, power is no longer a zero-sum game. No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation. No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed. No balance of power among nations will hold. The traditional division between nations of the south and north makes no sense in an interconnected world. Nor do alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long gone Cold War.
If no nation that is elevated above another can succeed, that by necessity means America does not have the ability to maintain a dominant position in the world—something which President Obama seems to believe is a bad idea even if it were possible.
Indeed, a recurring theme in President Obama’s rhetoric is that more than at any point in human history, the interest of nations and peoples are shared and that the common interests of human beings—ending global warming, stopping nuclear proliferation, achieving peace and prosperity—is stronger than the differences among nations. His job is to remind nations of the importance of mutual respect because of our mutual interests. And only by breaking old patterns can we become more interconnected. President Obama envisions himself as the world’s great bridge builder and synthesizer.
Beyond that, if a president engages the world—tyrannies and autocracies like Iran and North Korea, Syria and Rus
sia, Darfur and Zimbabwe, and a dozen other nations—based on the conviction that we are always dealing with common interests more than we are dealing with competing interests and ideologies, it could lead to serious miscalculation, decline, and even disaster. Here again we can turn to Dean Acheson for wisdom. Released from the acceptance of a dogma that builders and wreckers of a new world order could and should work happily and successfully together, he wrote, [Truman] was free to combine our power and coordinate our action with those who did have a common purpose.
Between Harry Truman and Barack Obama, give me Truman every time.
In the face of Obama’s approach and foreign policy agenda, we need to do several things.
The first is fairly elementary: We should treat our allies like the allies they are. That means, for starters, not being harder on them, or demanding more from them, than we do from our adversaries. It means treating them with respect rather than with offense. It means striving to make their lives easier rather than harder. It means consulting them on key decisions before they are made, and especially communicating with them if we must take a route they find troubling. And it means not stabbing them in the back.
We should honor the basic rules that govern state-to-state affairs. Foreign policy commitments are not to be made and unmade at will, Margaret Thatcher has said. We are bound by past commitments. We have a respect for past contracts, both as governments and as ordinary citizens. We cannot expect others to keep their word to us unless we keep our word to them.
Keeping our word to our allies is a matter of honor, then, but it is also a matter of self-interest. The United States needs allies for economic, political, and national security reasons. Good allies and strong alliances allow us to share the burdens we carry, complement and supplement our efforts, and present a united front against those who wish us harm.
When we treat allies in a desultory manner—and especially if we act in a way that causes them to question our reliability and resolve, our commitment and staying power—they will, out of their own self-interest, turn to others, including those wishing America ill. If Poland and the Czech Republic can’t count on America to support them, they will have to bend to the will and wishes of Russia. If our friends in Latin America become convinced that we are turning our back on them, they will feel compelled to reach out to Hugo Chávez, who is seeking to lead a revolution on the continent that takes its inspiration from Castro’s Cuba. If the Arab nations believe that America will allow Iran to dominate the Middle East and will acquiesce in its acquisition of nuclear weapons, they will inevitably move into Iran’s sphere of influence, even though Iran is a Shia nation and the Arab Sunni states have hitherto resisted Iranian power projection. If Japan believes the United States is weakening its commitment on the Asian continent, it will distance itself from America and be forced to seek an alliance with China. By seeking to appease its enemies, the United States will only alienate its allies, and eventually America will have no friends at all.
We must also act to strengthen the American economy, which has been the cornerstone upon which America’s international leadership has rested in part during the last half-century. As I will discuss at length in later chapters, our economy has been the wonder of the modern world. We can outwork and outproduce any nation on the planet. When we unlock the full talent and energy of individual Americans, it results not only in prosperity but in innovation, in the capacity to adapt to a rapidly changing world, and in stunning breakthroughs in technology and science. What I am describing is not Pollyannaish speculation; it is the record and achievement of modern free-market capitalism.
These things are now at risk because of the economic policies of President Obama. His effort to expand the size, reach, and role of government is without precedent in our history. His plans would leave us with a crushing deficit and debt, far beyond anything we have ever experienced. Confiscatory taxes will have to be imposed on future generations to make up for the shortfall. This in turn will undermine growth and the spirit of entrepreneurship that have characterized our nation at its best.
It is an often-remarked-upon irony that at a time when Europe is moving away from socialism and its many failures, President Obama is moving us toward that direction.
To ensure that America remains safe and maintains its role as a defender of freedom, we also need to increase our defense spending to at least 4 percent of our GDP per year, including substantial and increasing support for missile defense. Under President Obama, our defense spending will decline as a share of our economy and of the federal budget. And it will fall far below what is required to meet our global commitments. We are engaged in two hot wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and facing growing threats in almost every region of the world. Weakness invites challenges, acts of intimidation, acts of aggression, and sometimes war. Right now America is, based on its defense spending, well on the road to weakness.
We also need to remind ourselves that the most attractive thing about America is our ideals: our commitment to democracy and free elections; to limited government and the consent of the governed; to unalienable rights and political equality; to freedom of the press and speech, assembly, and religion. We believe in championing democracy and human rights because they lead to human flourishing and to a more peaceful and prosperous world, one that more closely aligns with the values and interests of the United States. To again invoke the words of Margaret Thatcher:
Democracies . . . have never been engaged against each other in warfare in any major way. To reduce the risk of war, therefore, we must work for steady progress towards more democracies. With the advancing tide of democracy, the risk of war recedes. If the tide of democracy recedes, the risk of war advances.
So we should encourage democracy where we can, give aid and comfort to those who want it, and not undermine those who already have it.
Undergirding all of these things must be the certain conception of the goodness and greatness of America. The United States is the birthplace of modern politics, the first nation to be founded on a transcendent set of political principles. America was not only founded on these principles, it has fought and died for them in wars across the globe. These were conflicts we participated in, not in order to claim new territory but to uphold certain human ideals; to free people from death camps, gulags, and killing fields; and to defeat malevolent ideologies, whether Nazism, fascism, communism, or violent jihadism.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that America is a perfect country. We have made mistakes and committed grave offenses over the centuries. Too often we have failed to live up to our ideals. But to say that is to say that we live in this fallen world rather than a perfect one, a world composed not of angels but of flawed and imperfect beings. And, crucially, our past faults and errors have long been acknowledged and do not deserve the repetition that suggests either that we have been reluctant to remedy them or that we are inclined to repeat them. What we should say and repeat is this: No nation has shed more blood for more noble causes than the United States. Its beneficence and benevolence are unmatched by any nation on earth, and by any nation in history.
Abraham Lincoln understood that the destiny of the world was twined to the destiny of America. It is why he called the United States the last, best hope of earth. It is still so. As citizens of America, we should be filled with love and gratitude for what this country has been, for what it is, and for what it can still be.
And of all people, we should expect our president to understand these things, to expect that his bonds of affection for our country would be obvious and unbreakable. In a world composed of nations that are filled with rage and hate for the United States, our president should proudly defend her rather than continually apologize for her.
America deserves that, and it deserves much more than that.
I reject the view that America must decline. I believe in American exceptionalism. I am convinced that we can act together to strengthen the nation, to preserve our global leadership, and to protect freedom where
it exists and promote it where it does not. What is ahead of us now will not be easy. It will be difficult to overcome the challenges we face, to maintain our national strength and purpose even as China, Russia, and the jihadists pursue their own ambitions. It will be difficult to repair the damage from the economic panic of 2008 and the intemperate actions that have been justified as steps to remedy it. I don’t worry about our ability to overcome any problem or threat. But I do wonder whether we will take action that is timely, and that we will act before the necessary correction is massively disruptive, or thrust upon us in the midst of agony and surprise even greater than 9/11 or Pearl Harbor.
We have been accustomed to being the world’s leading nation for so long, enjoying the freedom, security, and prosperity that comes with that leadership, that we have tended to avoid the hard work that overcoming challenges requires. When I was about ten, I asked my dad how he thought his company’s Rambler automobile could ever successfully compete with General Motors; they were so far ahead that catching up appeared impossible. He said something that has since been widely attributed to him: There is nothing as vulnerable as entrenched success. I believe that our many years of success may, in fact, be the greatest obstacle we face. In election after election, candidates have told us that simple measures will solve our challenges, and that their election alone will guarantee a bright future. We have joined in the cheering for this heady prospect. But much more than cheering is going to be required in the years ahead.