I was going to respond to Mitt Romney’s aggressively chuckleheaded attack on the new START treaty yesterday, but John Kerry has done it for me. Romney’s foreign policy pronouncements are always painful, since he knows less-than-zero about the subject and, so far as I can tell, hasn’t made much of a first-hand effort to learn anything about it. His efforts to seem all tough and Republican are entirely transparent. If he really wanted to be creative, he would return to the Realist tradition of Nixon (minus Vietnam), the real Reagan (not the mythic one) and Bush the Elder. These Presidents, Reagan especially, negotiated dramatic weapons reduction deals with the Russians. He might also study the testimony of the Republican Secretary of Defense Robert Gates–another realist–about which forms of missile defense work and which don’t.
But I don’t think he will.