issue: Foreign Policy & Defense

RealClearWorld: Iran’s Last Chance

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

For all the bluster and thundering certitudes of President Obama’s critics, no one really knows for sure if Iran’s new government is serious about pursuing a nuclear weapon. Thanks to the deal struck in Geneva last weekend, we are likely to find out sometime in the next six months.

The agreement is intended to test Iran’s willingness to neuter its nuclear program in exchange for a way out of its deepening economic and political isolation. It is probably Tehran’s last chance to avoid a U.S. or Israeli military strike aimed at destroying its nuclear facilities.

Although fairly modest in scope, the Geneva deal carries some obvious risks. Relaxing economic pressure now may sap the international community’s will to maintain stiff sanctions on Iran indefinitely. And if the deal succeeds, Iran will gain a measure of international legitimacy without having to relent on its harsh internal repression, support for terrorism or hostility toward Israel.

Nonetheless, the worst outcome of all — for the United States, for Sunni Arab states terrified of Shiite Iran’s regional ambitions and for Israel — is an Islamic Republic with nuclear weapons. President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry are trying to stave off that strategic calamity without resorting to war.

 Giving the president zero benefit of the doubt is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who denounced the deal as “bad and dangerous.” For him, the agreement confirms growing suspicions that Obama will never resort to the one option — force — that can neutralize Iran’s nuclear threat, despite the president’s repeated vows to keep that option “on the table.” In fact, the deal effectively gives Iran six month’s immunity from an Israeli military strike.

Also convinced that the mullahs have taken Obama to the cleaners are U.S. conservatives. They complain that the agreement doesn’t require Tehran to stop all enrichment as a condition for sanctions relief. That’s true; it’s an interim agreement that slows down Iran’s nuclear program for six months, during which time a comprehensive resolution is supposed to be reached. Applying the same sledgehammer logic that led to the government shutdown debacle, Republicans evidently believe anything less than Iran’s immediate and unconditional surrender constitutes appeasement.

Meanwhile, some influential Democrats aren’t showing much enthusiasm for the Geneva deal either. Senators Chuck Schumer and Robert Menendez, chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, have vowed to keep pushing for new sanctions on Iran anyway. Rather than turning the screws on Iran, though, this would likely shift the onus of intransigence from Tehran to Washington, embolden Iranian hardliners who oppose any bargain with the Great Satan, and undermine Obama’s negotiating leverage. Why should Iran’s comparatively pragmatic new president, Hassan Rouhani, take any risks for a peaceful resolution of the standoff if Obama can’t deliver on his commitments?

Now there’s talk on Capitol Hill of passing sanctions that won’t kick in for six months. But it’s almost always a mistake for Congress to try to micromanage foreign policy, especially delicate negotiations between two feuding nations that haven’t talked directly to each other since 1979.

Besides, the idea that layering on new sanctions will force Iran to capitulate totally misreads what motivates its rulers. Yes, the sanctions have inflicted growing economic pain, and Rouhani is eager to reduce that pressure. Tehran urgently needs hard currency, and it needs to sell its oil on global markets again. But Iran has added centrifuges, stepped up enriching and moved steadily closer to a nuclear breakout even as the international community has ratcheted up the economic and political pressure. The Islamic Republic, for which opposing American “imperialism” is not just a policy but a founding principle, isn’t going to cave in to demands from a U.S.-led coalition.

It might be induced, however, to embrace a face-saving formula in which the United States and its P5+1 partners tacitly acknowledge Iran’s “right to enrich” in exchange for a verifiable dismantling of its capacity to develop enough weapons grade uranium or plutonium to make a nuclear weapon.

Skepticism toward Iran is perfectly rational, given its deceptive behavior over the past decade, but creative statecraft demands more than straight-line extrapolation from previous experience. Sometimes, with imagination and courage, bitter antagonists do break through the crust formed by decades of profound mistrust, and find a new modus vivendi. That’s what happened during Nixon’s “opening” of China in 1972, at Camp David in 1979, in the Reagan-Gorbachev 1988 “walk in the woods” and the 1998 Easter accords that pacified Northern Ireland.

Under the interim deal, Iran will dilute or otherwise render harmless its highly enriched uranium and halt further enrichment above 5 percent. It will also stop fuel production for the heavy water reactor at Arak, which by producing plutonium could give Iran a second route to the bomb. In return, the coalition is offering about $7 billion relief from economic sanctions.

At a minimum the deal sets the clock back on Iran’s ability to acquire nuclear weapons. If we’re lucky, it will trigger a dynamic of horse-trading and incremental trust-building that could make bigger breakthroughs possible in six months. If not, then we’ll know that Tehran is once again stringing the international community along, and we’ll react accordingly.

In either case, the deal will clarify at last Iran’s real intentions — and the course America should pursue.

RealClearWorld published this article by PPI president Will Marshall.  You can find the original article here.

How Belgium Survived 20 Months Without a Government

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

If you think a few days of “government shutdown” in the U.S. is bad, consider that in 2010-2011, Belgium had a political crisis that prevented formation of a government for 589 days. What may be most surprising, though, is that the Belgians found a way to keep their government programs and services running without serious interruption.

Belgians are far more divided than Democrats and Republicans in the U.S., split between a wealthier Flemish-speaking north with 60 percent of the population and a less prosperous French-speaking south. The cultural distinctions, linguistic antagonism, and regional separation between the two halves of the nation have long made it difficult to create a coherent majority in a parliament full of multiple small parties split along communal lines.

But the nation’s long-running divisions hit an all-time-low when the prime minister resigned in April 2010 and no new parliamentary majority could be established. Round after round of fruitless negotiations went on for the rest of 2010 and most of 2011. No faction or party was willing to compromise, nor could any single politician emerge as a unifying figure.

So what happened to the crucial work of Belgium’s government? Nothing much at all – things mostly went on as usual. The prior government stayed on in a “caretaking capacity” and the bureaucracy continued to hum along. As a report in Time put it: ” the absence of a government makes little difference to day-to-day life in Belgium…. Belgium deftly helmed the presidency of the E.U. in the second half of 2010, and the caretaker government last month headed off market jitters over its debt levels by quickly agreeing on a tighter budget. The country is recovering well from the downturn, with growth last year at 2.1 percent (compared with the E.U. average of 1.5%), foreign investment doubling and unemployment at 8.5 percent, well below the E.U. average of 9.4%. ‘By and large, everything still works. We get paid, buses run, schools are open,’ says Marc De Vos, a professor at Ghent University.”

Continue reading at the Washington Monthly.

Obama Has Demoted Liberty

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

President Barack Obama has demoted liberty and democracy as primary U.S. foreign policy goals, at least where the Middle East is concerned.  So the president informed the world in his address to the United Nations last week.

Obama said four “core interests” would henceforth guide U.S. policy toward the Middle East and North Africa: protecting our allies, ensuring the flow of oil, fighting anti-American terrorists, and preventing the use of weapons of mass destruction. While he said U.S. efforts to “promote democracy, human rights, and open markets” will continue, they are now relegated explicitly to the second tier of U.S. interests.

Not so fast Mr. President. Shouldn’t Democrats at least be questioning Obama’s logic, if not raising objections?  After all, the president’s embrace of realpolitik is at odds with the party’s liberal internationalist outlook, which on balance has served America and the world well for seven decades.

Continue reading at CNN.

The New Politics of Production: A Progressive High-Growth Strategy

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute
Will Marshall’s piece, excerpted here, was part of the Policy Network’s recent publication “Progressive Politics after the Crash: Governing from the Left.”

The US is struggling to find a way out of overlapping economic crises. One is cyclical: a painfully slow, jobless recovery from a recession magnified by the 2008 financial crash. The other is structural: US economic output and job growth have fallen well off the pace of previous decades. Although liberal commentators seem preoccupied with rising inequality, America’s fundamental economic problem is slow growth.

Even before the recession struck, the once-mighty American job machine was sputtering. Between 2000 and 2007, the US posted its worst job creation record in any decade since the Great Depression. Not only have many good jobs vanished, but also real wages have fallen or turned stagnant for all but the top US earners.

Overall economic growth has been declining steadily since the halcyon years after World War II, when the babies boomed and GDP grew at a robust average of 4 per cent per year. National output fell to 3 per cent during the 1970s and 1980s, before picking up in the late 1990s. Since 2000, the economy has downshifted again, averaging under 2 per cent growth per year. Research from the Kauffman Foundation also suggests a loss of entrepreneurial verve. The number of business start-ups, which Kauffman says generate most of US net job growth, has plummeted by about a quarter since 2006.

If there is a bright spot in the US economy, it is the rebound of corporate profits and stock prices since 2009. Yet these gains also highlight a stark inequity: returns to capital are up, but returns to labour are down.

In President Kennedy’s day, US prosperity really did lift all boats. Today, however, productivity gains do not automatically translate into higher pay for workers, especially people with middling skills. ‘This is America’s largest economic challenge’, says the economist Robert J.  Shapiro. ‘People can no longer depend on rising wages and salaries when the economy expands.’

Amid such dismal conditions, Obama’s re-election by a comfortable margin (5 million votes) was an astounding political feat. Despite Republican challenger Mitt Romney’s claims that Obama fumbled the recovery, swing voters credited the president with having prevented the economy from capsizing during the perfect storm of 2008–9. It helped too that Romney offered no theory of his own for rekindling growth beyond hackneyed calls for lower taxes and regulation.

Unfortunately, little has happened since Obama’s victory to dispel the pall of economic pessimism that hangs over America. A late spring poll, for example, found that nearly 60 per cent of Americans worry about ‘falling out of (their) current economic class over the next few years’. No doubt subpar job growth is chiefly responsible for such unwonted gloom. According to preliminary figures, the number of people with jobs grew by only 28,000 (0.02 per cent) during Obama’s first term.

And there is little relief in sight. The Congressional Budget Office forecasts weak GDP growth and abnormally high unemployment persisting to the end of Obama’s second term. America is stuck in a slow-growth rut. While liberal Keynesians are calling for more shortterm spending to kick-start the pace of recovery, what progressives really need is a bolder plan for overcoming structural impediments to more robust growth.

Instead of devising one, Obama is bogged down in Washington’s endless trench warfare over taxes, spending and debt. True, the president won a tactical victory in averting the ‘fiscal cliff ’ and forcing Republicans to swallow higher tax rates on wealthy households. Yet this modest blow for tax fairness did little to fix the nation’s debt or stimulate growth. In fact, distributional politics distracts progressives from a truly historic opportunity to lay new foundations for US prosperity in the twenty-first century.

To inspire hope for such a change, the US president must broaden his message from fairness to growth: he must put America back on a highgrowth path. By setting audacious goals – say, doubling the growth rate and halving unemployment by the end of his second term – Obama
would convey the requisite sense of national urgency

A clarion call for renewed growth would create political space for progressive initiatives – public investments in training and education, broad tax reform – intended to spread economic gains more widely. And, by fanning hopes for a reversal of America’s economic decline, such a call could help Democrats make inroads among white working-class voters.

These voters, once the backbone of Democrats’ New Deal–Great Society coalition, have since defected en masse to the Republican camp. A conscious campaign to start winning them back, while retaining the Democrats’ strong advantages with young and minority voters, is the key to building a durable progressive majority and ending the 50:50 polarisation that has paralysed Washington.

Read the entire piece by Will Marshall.

The Atlantic: It’s Time for a New United Nations

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In March of 2011 and just hours before the United Nations Security Council vote, Libyan dictator Muammar Ghaddafi promised citizens of Benghazi–his own countrymen–that he was “coming tonight” and that would show them “no mercy and no pity.” Gaddafi’s brazen statement telegraphed an impending attack with a high possibility massive civilian casualties.

In the Security Council immediately following Gaddafi’s threats, Russia and China–two permanent members with noted authoritarian governments themselves–abstained from voting on resolution 1973, which authorized “all necessary measures to protect civilians… including Benghazi.” (Germany, Brazil, and India, then-rotating members of the Security Council, abstained as well for their own reasons.)

In hindsight, Russia seems to have regretted its abstention. In January 2012, speaking about the growing civil war in Syria, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told Australian TV that “the international community unfortunately did take sides in Libya and we would never allow the Security Council to authorize anything similar to what happened in Libya” in Syria.

That seems odd, because “what happened in Libya” was, on balance, a good thing: A sustained NATO air campaign unquestionably protected many more innocent civilians than it harmed and weakened Gaddafi’s forces en route to his downfall. What’s more, the Libya operation served as validation for those supporting the “responsibility to protect,” a 2006 Security Council mandate that called on parties involved in armed conflict to bear primary responsibility to protect civilians, approved by a unanimous 15-0 vote.

Continue reading at the Atlantic.

Foreign Policy: Absent Without Leave

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In the late 1960s, Britain signaled the end of its long run as a world power by withdrawing from major military bases east of the Suez Canal. Today, as the White House confronts the crisis in Syria, could America be facing its own “east of Suez” moment?

The historical parallels aren’t exact. Britain was an empire; the United States isn’t — despite the tendentious polemics of inveterate anti-Americans, from Noam Chomsky to Glenn Greenwald. Britain had already been surpassed by bigger superpowers by the 1960s. That hasn’t happened to America and isn’t likely to happen in the foreseeable future. But the debate over intervention in Syria has illuminated large and growing cracks in the internationalist consensus that has underpinned U.S. global leadership since World War II.

That consensus has been strained to a breaking point by feral partisanship and by a Republican Party increasingly in thrall to libertarian ideas. As a skeptical Congress awaits a possible vote on President Barack Obama’s proposal to use military force against Bashar al-Assad’s regime, the big question is whether the United States can still muster the internal cohesion to play a decisive role in world affairs.

In his prime-time address Sept. 10, Obama asked Congress to postpone the vote pending a possible deal with Russia that would transfer Syria’s chemical arsenal to international custody. The scheme could spare Obama the embarrassment of being rebuffed by Congress, where sentiment against a U.S. strike has been hardening. But the fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin, Assad’s enabler and the U.S. president’s tormentor in chief, is the one throwing Obama a political lifeline should give us pause about the deal’s merits. To be sure, the deal would be good for Obama, allowing him to boast that his threat to use force compelled Assad to give up his chemical weapons. It might also earn Putin a Nobel Peace Prize. But it won’t end the agony of the Syrian people, because it would leave Assad free to go right on killing them with conventional weapons.

If Washington forswears the use of force against Syria, as Putin is demanding, it will have paid a very high price for reinforcing the norm against chemical warfare. The Russian gambit, moreover, may founder on its sheer impracticality: Will Assad, his back to the wall, really give up his most fearsome weapon? And how will U.N. weapons inspectors be able to find and remove all the regime’s chemical weapons in the middle of a war zone? Even from a purely logistical standpoint, the Russian proposal may be close to impossible.

Read the piece at Foreign Policy.

RealClearWorld: A Tipping Point in Syria?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As political violence engulfs the Middle East, the White House seems to sink deeper into incoherence and passivity. Will reports of a massive chemical attack on Syrian civilians finally rouse President Obama from his torpor, or will they become just the latest outrage du jour in the region’s never-ending horror show?

The Syrian opposition claimed that forces loyal to Syrian dictator Bashar Assad used chemical weapons to kill over 1,000 civilians in the Ghouta suburb of Damascus. Buttressing these reports were harrowing videos of people struggling to breath and photos of scores of bodies that born no outward signs of injury. If confirmed, the poison gas attack would put Assad in the same league as Iraq‘s Saddam Hussein, who used chemical bombs to wipe out 5,000 Kurds in the town of Halabja in 1988.

The alleged massacre coincides with the arrival in Syria of a UN team charged with investigating reports that the regime unleashed small-scale chemical attacks against opponents last spring. The timing suggests how little Assad worries about crossing the “red line” President Obama has drawn against the use of chemical weapons. Or perhaps it’s a veiled warning about what he’s prepared to do if Western powers intervene in Syria.

Although warmly applauded by foreign policy “realists,” the administration’s resolve to stand aloof from crisis has been a strategic and moral failure. What began as a civil uprising has morphed into something worse: a full-fledged proxy war that is inflaming the region’s sectarian divisions. As Shia Iran and Hezbollah fight to save their ally Assad, Sunni jihadis — some marching under the banner of al Qaeda – are pouring into Syria. This makes it easier for Assad to posture as a protector of Alawite and Christian minorities and a bulwark against the very Salafist terrorists that keep U.S. intelligence agencies awake at night.

But this is emphatically not a case of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” America has no interest in the survival of a homicidal tyrant and war criminal like Assad, even if his fall presents openings to Sunni extremists in Syria. And in truth, the United States isn’t very good — thankfully — at the kind of cold blooded realpolitik that counsels standing by while Assad, Iran and Hezbollah and Sunni fanatics bleed each other in Syria.

Continue reading at RealClearWorld.

The Perils of Non-Intervention in Syria

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

After two years of escalating violence, the Syrian rebellion looks more and more like a Middle East version of the Spanish Civil War. It has turned into a vicious proxy war that is cleaving the region along sectarian lines and inspiring atrocities on all sides – ironically, the very dangers opponents of U.S. intervention have warned against.

President Barack Obama’s original decision to stand aloof from the Syrian uprising reflected his broader strategy of extricating America from Middle East conflicts. It also mirrored the anti-intervention consensus that has come to dominate U.S. foreign policy debates in the wake of our long and costly engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But as the death toll rises — and as Iran and Hezbollah go all in for Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, provoking a counter-mobilization of Sunni jihadists from across the region — Washington’s hands-off stance has become strategically and morally untenable…

Continue reading at CNN.

After Terrorism, Fools Rush In

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The pattern is sickeningly familiar: After every atrocity committed in the name of Islam, left-wing intellectuals and celebrities, scarcely bothering to conceal their schadenfreude, start lecturing us on the West’s moral failings.

So it was this week, when a young British soldier was butchered in broad daylight in the streets of London by men of Nigerian descent claiming to avenge Western violence against Muslims. Before a decent interval could pass, the moral equivocators rushed in to validate the attackers’ claim and say, in effect, it’s all our fault.

Most egregious, as usual, was Michael Moore, whose anti-American agitprop has made him rich and famous. He offered this sarcastic tweet: “I am outraged that we can’t kill people in other countries without them trying to kill us.”

Glenn Greenwald, another American acolyte of the “blowback” thesis, used his column in The Guardian to take British leaders to task for calling the attack an act of terrorism. In Greenwald’s logic-chopping estimation, that’s the wrong word because the victim was a soldier, not a civilian, and since America has declared the whole world the battleground in its fight against terrorism, well, you can’t apply the T-word to this particular “horrific act of violence,” which should instead be properly regarded as an act of war.

This distinction seems unlikely to console the family of 25-year-old Lee Rigby, a drummer in the Royal Fusiliers. And it course it rests on an assumption of moral equivalence in the conflict between Islamist terrorists and the United States and its allies.

Continue reading “After Terrorism, Fools Rush In” →

“Cut and Invest” vs. Austerity

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

President Obama’s new budget attempts to define a progressive alternative to conservative demands for a politics of austerity. Having just returned from a gathering of center-left parties in Copenhagen, I can report that European progressives are wrestling with the same challenge, and are reaching similar conclusions.

There was wide agreement that the wrong answer is to revert to “borrow and spend” policies that have mired transatlantic economies in debt, while failing to stimulate sustained economic growth. The right answer is a “cut and invest” approach that shifts spending from programs that support consumption now to investments that will make our workers and companies more productive and competitive down the road.

“You can only have a Nordic model if you’re competitive,” declared conference host Helle Thorning-Schmidt, prime minister of Denmark. “In this country, we cannot tax more; it’s that simple,” she added. “If you like the welfare state, if you want to sustain it, you have to take the tough decisions.” Continue reading ““Cut and Invest” vs. Austerity” →

Obama Took His Time In Calling Boston Marathon Attack ‘Terrorism’

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

McClatchy’s Anita Kumar quotes PPI President Will Marshall on the President Obama’s response to the Boston marathon attack:

In his first term, the president was criticized for his responses to several potential incidents of terrorism.

Most notably, he was vacationing in Hawaii in 2009 and waited three days to speak publicly about the attempted bombing of a trans-Atlantic Northwest Airlines flight as it prepared to land in Detroit.

“There’s a suspicion among Republicans that he is only willing to be tough against al Qaida and nobody else,” said Will Marshall, a former Democratic speechwriter who heads the Progressive Policy Institute research center.

Obama, Marshall said, struck the right tone in trying to calm the nation after three people were killed and more than 170 were wounded Monday in two blasts near the finish line of the Boston Marathon.

“When there is a crisis we look to the president to be calm, not to be excitable, not boiling over,” he said.

Read the entire article here.

 

Despots Mourn Chavez

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Sean Penn lamented that he “lost a friend” when Venezuelan caudillo Hugo Chávez died yesterday. Sean, you’re not alone: So did the world’s dictators.

Hugo Chávez championed Venezuela’s poor and America’s adversaries – an irresistible combination in the eyes of what’s left of the Cold War left. Chávez , in fact, seemed positively nostalgic for the old East-West conflict.

When democracy spread across Latin America and Cuba looked like a communist relic, Chávez  cast himself as Fidel Castro’s understudy and kept his creaking regime afloat with Venezuelan petrodollars. When most of the rest of the world had tossed socialism into history’s dustbin, Chávez proclaimed a “Bolivarian” socialism as he nationalized industries and expropriated assets held by foreign investors.

And it wasn’t just Castro; Chávez made a habit of personally befriending the world’s worst dictators, presumably because they were the enemy of his enemy – the United States. Or maybe he simply admired them for brooking no domestic opposition, while he had to put up with an independent media, elections and the other tedious trappings of democracy. Whatever the reason, it was incongruous to see this self-styled tribune of the people getting chummy with the likes of Saddam Hussein, Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and his “brother” Muammar Qaddafi.

Continue reading “Despots Mourn Chavez” →

Don’t Let Hamas Win

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Sensing a rising Islamic tide in the Middle East, Hamas has picked a fight with Israel it can’t win militarily, but could win politically.  That’s something Secretary of State Hillary Clinton should prevent as she works to make a fragile cease fire hold.

No one wants to see Israeli forces go back into Gaza. A lot of Palestinians will be killed, many of them civilians.  A ground incursion also would highlight the asymmetry of power between the two sides, allowing Hamas to win sympathy by playing the victim. That’s why Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu is holding back, for now.

Nothing new here. Yasser Arafat and the PLO pioneered the cynical tactic of using terror attacks to provoke harsh Israeli reprisals, hoping that the resulting death and destruction among Palestinians would turn world opinion against the “occupation.”

What’s different now, of course, is the regional political landscape. Democratic elections have brought Islamic parties to power in Turkey, Egypt and Tunisia. Secular dictators like Hosni Mubarak held no brief for Hamas, but his successor, Mohammed Morsi can’t disavow a kind of kinship with Hamas, which considers itself a branch of his party, the Muslim Brotherhood.

Continue reading “Don’t Let Hamas Win” →

Slippery Mitt Evades KO

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

PPI President Will Marshall questions whether Romney’s rope-a-dope strategy on foreign policy may actually work despite Obama’s superior performance in the debate in Foreign Policy:

Mitt Romney is a candidate of protean principles. When his positions on issues become inconvenient, he simply throws them overboard, sometimes even denying he took them in the first place. So it was in Monday night’s foreign policy debate, when the ferocious Rottweiler of the previous two debates unexpectedly morphed into “Me-Too Mitt.”

It was a tactically shrewd performance that made a virtue of necessity. Romney clearly hasn’t mastered the complexities of defense and security policy, and at several points last night seemed uncomfortably out of his depth. Rather than mount a vigorous challenge to Barack Obama’s conduct of U.S. foreign policy, Romney dropped previous lines of attack and wound up agreeing with the president’s handling of conflicts in Afghanistan, Syria, and even Iran.

By stressing continuity rather than radical change in U.S. foreign policy, Romney sought to reassure voters that he is ready to take over as commander in chief. Although post-debate insta-polls showed that he “lost” the debate, he probably achieved this crucial goal. And the appearance of a kinder, gentler Romney blunted Obama’s aggressive attempts to portray him as a “reckless” throwback to the bellicose policies of George W. Bush.

Read the entire article at Foreign Policy.

Will Marshall on Romney’s Mistaken Foreign Policy Ideas

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

PPI President Will Marshall discusses Obama’s foreign policy advantages in Politico’s Arena:

Twice Mitt Romney has tried to capitalize politically on the murder of the U.S. Ambassador and three other Americans in Libya, and twice the issue has blown up in his face. First, as the tragedy was unfolding, he rushed out a statement falsely accusing the administration of apologizing for the video that sparked violent protests in Benghazi and elsewhere. And in the last debate, moderator Candy Crowley had to correct Romney’s erroneous claim that it took President Obama weeks to call the attack an act of terrorism.

These misfires show that Romney, though surefooted when it comes to critiquing the president’s economic record, has anything but a deft touch on defense and foreign policy. The president has a golden opportunity tonight to contrast his experience and grasp of global complexities with Romney’s vague and simplistic invocations of American strength and exceptional virtue.

Lacking a global outlook of his own, Romney probably will try again tonight to make the Libya episode a parable of weak presidential leadership.  In Romney’s retro world, it’s 1979 all over again, with Obama in the role of Jimmy Carter and Libya standing in for Iran. But even as he tries to channel Ronald Reagan, Romney often sounds more like George W. Bush, especially when he claims that bold assertions of American power and leadership will bring our enemies to heel and cause the rest of the world to fall in line. To which Obama has a compelling answer: Been there, done that.

Obama’s job tonight is to expose the unreality of Romney’s glib criticisms and force him to explain what he would actually do differently if he becomes Commander in Chief. With the spotlight momentarily off the economy, it’s the president’s turn to take the offensive.

Read it at Politico