(MENAFN- Khaleej Times) I may have missed it, but I've not seen a war that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan don't want to fight. Romney vows never to negotiate with the Taleban and declares, "We go anywhere they are and we kill them." He beats the war drums on Iran. He has a bizarre itch to open a new era of confrontation with Russia.
When he sniffs the possibility of war Romney drops his frequent imitation of the Beatles' "Nowhere Man" ("Doesn't have a point of view, knows not where he's going to"). He becomes a Real Man fired up.
After more than a decade of inconclusive US wars, this is not reassuring.
In a similar vein, Ryan, whose experience outside Washington is limited, believes that in Afghanistan, "Now is the time to lock in the success that is within reach." Said "success" is as hard to identify as the tax loopholes Ryan insists he wants to close.
The big question, of course, is how all this squares with the concerns over the US debt that Romney has placed at the center of the campaign by picking Ryan. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have already cost over $1.3 trillion. Several estimates, including one last year from Brown University, suggest the final bill will be $3.7 trillion or higher.
New or rebooted wars are scarcely the fiscal medicine the United States needs.
Ryan seemed to grasp this last year when he declared in a speech in Washington: "If there's one thing I could say with complete confidence about American foreign policy, it is this: Our fiscal policy and our foreign policy are on a collision course; and if we fail to put our budget on a sustainable path, then we are choosing decline as a world power."
The Wisconsin congressman was right about that. Yet Romney and Ryan are up for any costly fight. One reason, of course, is that they face a president who, with a bold decision, eliminated America's mortal enemy, Osama bin Laden, and whose cool review of "kill lists" selecting the next targets of drone attacks hardly suggests a lack of decider's testosterone. Upping the military ante against this incumbent is not easy. But, as Ryan's introduction before the USS Wisconsin suggests, it is something Romney feels he must do in pursuit of his new American Century. Here we come to the heart of the matter: the desperate Republican quest to portray Obama as a quasi-European intent on the very European business of managed decline rather than renewed American glory.
No fiscal detail â€" a trillion here, a trillion there â€" can stand in the way of what Romney has called his "one overwhelming conviction and passion" â€" that the 21st century be as American as the 20th. Battlefield triumph seems to be part of the Romney-Ryan recipe for this.
Romney has zeroed in on a phrase in a campaign white paper written last fall by the historian Eliot Cohen, who argued that the Obama administration views US decline as a "condition that can and should be managed for the global good rather than reversed."
Ryan, likewise, has said that some â€" read the Obama administration â€" have decided "that the choice we face is over how, not whether, to manage our nation's decline." But these "calls to surrender" must be rejected; the United States is "a nation whose best days still lie ahead of us, if we make the necessary choices today."
I believe in the enduring centrality of American power; I don't believe the nation's immense capacity for renewal is exhausted. But more war is not the "necessary" choice for the United States today if fiscal and foreign policy are to be taken off their "collision course." The 2014 timetable for ending the combat mission in Afghanistan is right; war with Iran is avoidable; the lesson of Iraq and Afghanistan, wars without victories, must be learned. And even all the right choices for the United States will not alter the rise of India and China or make the 21st century America's as the 20th was.
Obama, as Joseph Lelyveld wrote in a recent New York Review of Books essay, has two major foreign policy achievements: "Getting American forces out of Iraq and compressing his predecessor's expansive, grandiose-sounding 'Global War on Terror' into a narrowly focused, unremitting campaign against the remnants of the Qaeda network, relying largely on high-tech intelligence gathering and pilotless drones."
These are sober achievements for sobering times. Economic turnaround is Job 1 for the next president. It will not be fostered by delusion, nostalgia or military overreach.
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