Mitt Romney’s recent speech at the military school, The Citadel, revealed that “American Exceptionalism” likely would be a major theme of a Romney candidacy, with a campaign built around a slogan, “Believe In America.”
A “white paper” — AN AMERICAN CENTURY — A Strategy to Secure America’s Enduring Interests and Ideals — released in connection with the speech, makes clear that a big part of the campaign effort will be to belittle President Obama as an apologizer for America. It says,
“The sins President Obama has repented in our collective name are American arrogance, dismissiveness, and derision; for dictating solutions, for acting unilaterally, for acting without regard for others; for treating other countries as mere proxies, for unjustly interfering in the internal affairs of other nations, for committing torture, for fueling anti-Islamic sentiments, for dragging our feet in combating global warming, and for selectively promoting democracy. …A President who is so troubled by America’s past cannot lead us into the future.”
In contrast to Obama’s supposed apologies, in his Citadel speech, Romney declared, “I will not surrender America’s role in the world. This is very simple: If you do not want America to be the strongest nation on Earth, I am not your President. You have that President today.”
The white paper and the Citadel speech emphasized again and again that this century should be “An American Century,” using the same term that defined those advisers of George W. Bush, the designers of the preemptive Iraq War doctrine, known as “Neoconservatives.” As it turns out, Romney has recruited some of the same “American Exceptionalism” cheerleaders to work for his campaign.
If the Citadel speech is any indication, it is clear that a Romney candidacy will preach fear, fear, fear — and will attempt to make the case why a “USA. USA. USA” must acquire an even bigger military. “The American Conservative” calls itself, “The magazine for thinking conservatives,” and in response to the Citadel speech, Rod Dreher writes in “Romney’s Project For A New American Century” that the speech boils down to: “USA is No. 1! God commands us to be, for we are a chosen people, and if the rest of the world doesn’t like it, tough, we’ll do what we want to do to advance our mission of spreading our values universally.”
Dreher writes, “So it goes with Mitt Romney’s project for a new American century. It’s as if the Iraq War never happened, that there were no lessons to be learned from it. It’s as if Romney hadn’t noticed the dire fiscal straits our nation is in. Nothing here but stale old thinking (tip-off: using Cold War phrasing with “the free world”), rhetorical bombast, and implacable faith in the imperial project. None of this is surprising. It is all depressing.”
There are a lot of the interesting comments in response to Dreher’s post. I had to chuckle at the first one:
- This isn’t foreign policy. This is a speech delivered by a man on a balcony…
- It’s long been Mormon doctrine that the Constitution is “divinely inspired.” With this comes a heaping helping of American exceptionalism.
- No candidate, in either party, who fundamentally disagrees with this American exceptionalism has any chance at a major-party nomination.
- This speech doesn’t bother me in the least. Just more Romney pandering to get the red-state rednecks to vote for a guy from Massachusetts.
- The neo-cons believe there remains a committed core of Republican activists who bought into the American Century project and believe it is only the defeatist, un-American Democrats that never have loved this country, who undermine morale, and keep us from the greatness that God intends us to have. This cadre may have been demoralized by the latter Bush years, but they remain the key to the nomination. They can be courted, and with the right words, convinced to believe once again.
- I am astonished that the neo con perspective has not been utterly discredited. Their hubris, naiveté, ignorance and arrogance has cost this country plenty and I suspect those costs will play themselves out for a long time. Yet here we have their ideas being resurrected again. So discouraging.
Lawrence S. Wittner in “Romney’s Neocon Foreign Policy Plan”, writes, “One wonders what citizens and statesmen of other nations think of this potential world leader who argues that his country is confronted everywhere by malignant enemies, must forever be militarily supreme, is exempt from following international law, can do no wrong, has been created by God, and must dominate the planet for the rest of this century.”
While Romney’s plan may be be of questionable wisdom, it is a natural politically in view of his need to move his polling numbers among Republican primary voters, which have been stuck. The thinking and feeling expressed here will fly there, particularly with neoconservative power brokers and military industrial complex powers who held forth through much of the Bush administration, but also among Southern voters, many of whom will not accept Romney’s religion, Massachussets roots and authorship of the Obama Administration’s health care plan. Romney is in an 8 person arm wrestle for the nomination and, while none of his adversaries have yet to make much impression, he very much needs to make some headway in some Republican constituencies and create the impression that he is inexorably moving toward the nomination. This speech seems designed to do that.