Dan Grantham
Monday’s debate between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama was heated and divisive. With four years in the Oval Office under his belt, I think that regardless of personal political beliefs, we can agree Obama has more foreign policy experience than Gov. Romney. Still, I was intensely troubled by Romney’s prescription for foreign policy. Then again, I’m not a fan of neoconservative values.
Yes, I believe Romney is a neoconservative, and it is a word I exclusively use in a pejorative sense. Why? Not because I am intensely liberal (I am), but because a neoconservative foreign policy prescription is based not on existent realities, but on a reality created by elite conservative scholars in the wake of the perceived failings of liberal polices. Responding to the social upheavals of the 1960s, neoconservativism uses myth and a restrictive sense of American religious identity to harness and consolidate power.
As such, neoconservatism assumes that average Americans are too individualistic to act cohesively as a nation, but this, after all, is the paradox of liberal democracy: the importance of an indivisible nation made up of free citizens. To remedy the factitious nature of liberal democracy, neoconservatives use Christianity and the myth of American exceptionalism to justify foreign policy programs that assume, in Gov. Romney’s words, that the U.S. is “the hope of the earth.”
While national myths predate the late-twentieth century rise of neoconservativism, its success lies in the newer idea of the United States being endowed by its Creator to vanquish evil. But to vanquish evil, leaders need a “bad guy.” In this sense, Gov. Romney, like President Bush, has found pure evil in the form of Islam.
In Monday’s debate, Gov. Romney outlined his “straightforward” foreign policy to deal with the evil Muslim world. But there was nothing straight forward, or for that matter real, about Romney’s policies. They are unreal because Romney assumes, as a neoconservative, that the Muslim world accepts entirely the type of extremism that felled the World Trade Center. After all, neoconservatives argue, they are a tribal race too divided to have civility.
Apparently, the twenty-first century organization of the Arab Spring did not make the error of such a perception clear to Gov. Romney. But then again, neoconservatism’s source of power, the myth of America, is known by the followers of neoconservativism to be untrue. Thus, Gov. Romney argued that the Middle East is too backwards to create change for itself, knowing full well that it is. As such, his foreign policy prescription is to create more economic development, better education, gender equality and the rule of law. Seemingly ignorant of state sovereignty, I doubt Romney’s neoconservative policies could ever come to fruition.
What I am trying to say is that Gov. Romney’s foreign policy is based wholly in the lie of neoconservativism. The United States is not the hope for the earth, and if it was, it is not because we are a Christian nation fighting the idiocy of Islam. We are a state in a global system of other states, we know no better than any other state about how to “fix” the Middle East. Mr. Romney’s neoconservative worldview is exactly that which forments hatred against the United States. So let’s leave neoconservativism in the past. Better yet, leave Mitt Romney there too. I’m sure Ronald Reagan would be thrilled!