Mitt Romney traveled to the Virginia Military Institute yesterday — and took just 15 short minutes to shred the Obama-era first-term foreign-policy legacy.
It’s “the responsibility of [the] president to use America’s great power to shape history, not to lead from behind, leaving our destiny at the mercy of events,” he said.
Russia, China and other powers have hastened to fill the vacuum created by Obama policies, whose guiding principle — if there is one — has been to diminish America’s global footprint.
Obama apparently believes this makes for a peaceful world — but four years of growing chaos suggest otherwise.
“The president is fond of saying that ‘The tide of war is receding,’” Romney noted. “And I want to believe him as much as anyone.
“But when we look at the Middle East today — with Iran closer than ever to nuclear-weapons capability, with the conflict in Syria threatening to destabilize the region, with violent extremists on the march and with an American ambassador and three others dead, likely at the hands of al Qaeda affiliates — it is clear that the risk of conflict in the region is higher now than when the president took office.”
Obama’s greatest diplomatic project in the region has been to estrange Israel and create “daylight” between it and America, in the hopes of winning over Arab states.
The result: The peace process is in ruins, and there’s “a longing for American leadership,” not for Obama’s global vacuum.
America’s allies don’t like it when the United States casts off her burdens abroad. That may be an easy answer after a decade of war and terror, but it’s a gift to America’s enemies.
Witness: An ascendant China is “sending chills” throughout East Asia. Central Europe trembles as Putin’s Russia “casts a long shadow over young democracies.” And some 30,000 people have been murdered by Syria’s Assad, thanks in part to Obama’s silence and the arms of expansionist Iran.
“I believe that if America does not lead, others will — others who do not share our interests and our values — and the world will grow darker, for our friends and for us,” Romney said.
This was not the Berlin Wall speech Obama gave as a presidential candidate in 2008, when he proclaimed himself a “fellow citizen of the world” and asked a crowd of Germans to “answer our destiny, and remake the world once again.”
This was a speech for Americans, delivered to Americans — specifically, a roomful of cadets at VMI, an institution that crafts warriors.
Now, it’s true that the country’s eyes have been fixed firmly on the economy during Obama’s term — but that doesn’t mean the world has been standing still.
As Romney well understands: The terrorist attacks in Libya last month are part of “a larger struggle that is playing out across the broader Middle East — a region that is now in the midst of the most profound upheaval in a century.”
Romney knows the US response to this upheaval can’t be the studied neutrality of the Swiss, which Obama seems to prefer.
The United States must re-enter the fray as an oppositional force to the “darker” powers he described. “That is the role our friends want America to play again. And it is the role we must play,” he said.
The alternative? Four more years of brooding silence from the White House?
Not good enough.