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Topic: Romney’s old-world view of ‘New Europe’ (Read 63 times)

Jaga
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Romney’s old-world view of ‘New Europe’
« Thread Started on Aug 7, 2012, 12:30am »

Interesting article by Anne Applebaum from Washington Post:

Ignore the gaffes. They’ll soon be forgotten, and they don’t matter anyway. The real problem with Mitt Romney’s trip to Europe wasn’t that he sounded less than convinced about the London Olympics or that he gave short shrift to Palestinian culture. The problem was that the very idea of this particular trip — where he went and who he met, at least in Europe — was based on an outdated and increasingly misleading narrative about U.S. foreign policy.
In Britain and Poland, at least, Romney appeared to think he was paying visits to allies who are deeply disappointed by Barack Obama and who long for a return of American leadership in the form of a new George W. Bush — or, even better — a new Ronald Reagan. He imagined he would find soul mates in the British Tory party, just as Republicans used to do long ago. He imagined that Poles, freshly released from communism, would all thrill to a speech about John Paul II, Solidarity, Lech Walesa and the Cold War.....

Even foreigners now understand that an American president has only a limited ability to change the course of U.S. foreign policy. Obama’s most important decisions abroad — in Afghanistan, in Iraq — aren’t so very different from those Bush or Romney would make. More important, foreigners understand that the world is changing and that while the United States is still the world’s strongest power, it isn’t the world’s only power. Europeans are just as concerned about their own internal alliances, about their relationships with the emerging countries in the rest of the world — Brazil and India as well as China — and about their own complicated relations with Russia, still a major economic power on their continent by virtue of its gas reserves. They can’t dismiss Russia, as Romney did, as nothing but a “geopolitical foe.”
Indeed, they aren’t interested in any of the rhetoric that gets thrown around during American election campaigns, because it doesn’t really matter. Everyone knows that a new president will eventually change his tone — as Clinton did, as Bush did — whether it takes one year or four. So yes, there is disappointment abroad with Obama. But it doesn’t matter as much as Romney’s campaign team thinks.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2012/08/01/gJQAfpWNPX_story.html

« Last Edit: Aug 7, 2012, 12:31am by Jaga »

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