Editor’s Note: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.
Like a caveman frozen in a glacier, Mitt Romney is a man trapped in time—from his archaic stance on women’s rights to his belief in Herbert Hoover economics.
And now it appears his foreign policy is stuck in the past, as well.
This week, Romney is on a six-day, three-nation tour. The trip comes days after he promised in a speech on international affairs to usher in another “American century.”
What does Romney’s American century look like? His speech and his itinerary tell us volumes.
Romney’s world is one of special relationships, particularly with Britain, Israel and Poland—the three nations he’s visiting. It’s also a world of special enmities—against Iran—and unending suspicions—about China and Russia. For Romney, there are three types of countries: countries that are with us; countries that are against us; and countries that will be against us, sooner or later.
If this seems like foreign policy out of a twentieth-century history book—or the George W. Bush neocon playbook—that’s because it is. A President Romney wouldn’t bring about “another American century.” Rather, he would return us to some of the worst policies of the last century.
Editor’s Note: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.
