Hubris is not a strategy, either

[sailingaway]

It's telling that the most quotable line from Mitt Romney's foreign policy speech Monday is a reheated zinger from Rudy Giuliani's 2008 Republican National Convention speech: "Hope is not a strategy."

In the 2008 GOP race, the hawkish New York mayor served as a foil for peace candidate Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas. Paul consistently outpolled Giuliani, but it's Rudy's rhetoric that lives on in today's Romney campaign. As The Examiner's Philip Klein cracked Monday, "that Romney speech was not aimed at Ron Paul voters."

In his speech at the Virginia Military Institute, Romney called for a new approach to the Middle East, based on "these bedrock principles: America must have confidence in our cause, clarity in our purpose and resolve in our might." Those are attitudes, not principles. And if jut-jawed self-assurance that we know what we're doing in the Middle East was the key to victory, we'd have a little more to show from the last 11 years of war. Hope is not a strategy, but hubris isn't either.

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[Lucille]

Good piece.


"It is the responsibility of our president to use America's great power to shape history," Romney told the VMI cadets. Actually, the president's responsibility, per his oath of office in Article II, Section 1, is to "preserve, protect, and defend" the U.S. Constitution.

That document says nothing about using the U.S. military to bend the arc of history. When it comes to foreign policy, the Constitution has humbler goals. As the Preamble explains, the federal government was established to "provide for the common defence" of the United States and "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity."

Today, as my colleague Ben Friedman points out, "The United States does not have a defense budget. The adjective is wrong." Our bloated military budget and our overextended force posture have "little to do with the requirements of protecting Americans."

In last week's debate, Romney argued that "the amount of debt we're adding, at a trillion a year, is simply not moral." Yesterday he insisted that we must show the world that "we have the will and the wisdom to ... roll back our unsustainable debt [and] to reverse the catastrophic cuts now threatening our national defense." But when the governor complains about debt and -- in the same sentence -- declares 20 percent of the federal budget off limits, you have to wonder how morally serious he is.

[acptulsa]

Hubris may be a crappy Middle East policy, but it sure works for a GOP candidate in a debate. Not that it will help enough.