Many Americans are rightly disgusted by the non-choice they are offered in the presidential race every four years. This year is no different despite the serious problems that the United States faces at home and abroad. Mitt Romney has no actual plan to fix the...
The Foreign Policy Debate: Coke or Pepsi?
Monday’s presidential debate on foreign policy, as one might have expected, supplied more than its share of howlers. Mittens, for example, referred to Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez as one of the “world’s worst actors.” In response to an early Obama administration statement...
Debate Summary: Israel, Israel, Israel, Israel
One striking impression of this debate was that out of some 17,000 words uttered by both candidates and the moderator, about half of them were about domestic policy. Neither candidate wanted to talk about foreign policy — because the differences between them are...
Romney’s ‘Me Too’ Foreign Policy Debate
The much awaited foreign policy debate Monday night probably did nothing to create a clear contrast between President Barack Obama and his challenger Mitt Romney. It did, however, confirm that neither candidate offers much of a foreign policy vision moving into the...
Romney’s Pretty Little War Speech
Romney is fond of invoking Ronald Reagan and Harry Truman — and now George Marshall — as though their 20th century foreign policy legacies could lend his own cobbled-together worldview some indomitable burnish. But he seems loath to even utter the name of the American...
Race for the White House, 2012:
Whom to Root For?
In September of 1992, as the presidential election pitting George H. W. Bush against Bill Clinton loomed, libertarian theorist and all-around political junkie Murray Rothbard wrote a piece, “Making Our Way Back to the President,” in which he explained the key...
Romney, War, and the Republican Base: Libertarians May Split
Foreign policy is scarcely on the media radar covering Romney. Yet it is liable to have very great effect upon most Americans in the next years. Domestic problems are so intractable with voters so divided and cutting spending so difficult that foreign wars may be seen...
Obama Against the World
Since this is my version of an election piece, I plan to get the usual stuff out of the way fast. So yes, the smartest political odds-givers around believe President Obama has a distinct edge over Mitt Romney coming out of the conventions, the Senate is trending...
Rumors of Wars
The presidential candidates’ failure to have a serious discussion about Afghanistan and America’s other ongoing wars has been noted by many. Mitt Romney did not mention Afghanistan at all in his acceptance address. In his defense, he cited a speech made to the...
The Dumbing Down of American Foreign Policy
Think back to the election of 2008. Do you remember how one candidate had it easy? He had eight years of abject failure to run against. Eight years that included the launching of two dismal wars, the creation of a torture gulag with its crown jewel at...