At least three good reasons not to vote Romney

Namely, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich and John Bolton. There seem to be two foreign policies on offer, this election season: neoconservatism on the one side, and neocon-lite liberal interventionism on the other. Neither option is particularly appealing, but in this case it is very clear which option is worse. It would be inadvisable, to say the least, to vote for Romney this time (if that were not already abundantly clear). But never before in the history of the United States has there arrived a moment where creative thinking about foreign policy is so much demanded, and yet where neither of the parties seem to be entertaining any such thinking. Romney has referred to Russia as America’s ‘number one geopolitical foe’, ‘typically with China alongside’. On its face, this is a dangerously retrograde Cold War attitude that should have been flushed down the nearest lavatory facility twenty years ago; but on closer inspection, it is an attitude adopted by certain right-wing Trotskyists in this country on the basis that Russia is no longer communist (though all the same, neither hostile to public ownership nor to questioning the laïcist model of public expressions of religion).

Obama’s camp, though not so overtly belligerent in terms of the language it uses, is still stuck in the same confrontational modes. Clinton’s recent comments in Mongolia still make it clear that the State Department sees Russia and China as game-theoretical opponents, problems to be solved with carrots and sticks and made to come around to the neoliberal / capitalist point of view, rather than as a potential partner whose experiences and perspectives could be valuable to the way we approach other very definite problems. Including our economic ones, in point of fact.

All this while, as our mass media, pundits and policymakers continue talking about crises that threaten to expand our engagements abroad (Libya, Syria and Iran), we are still subjecting our troops, over and over again, to an increasingly quixotic exercise in building some kind of advantageous order in Afghanistan. The premises for our foreign policy are a quite frankly untenable mixture of military largesse and economically- and politically-neoliberal ideological interests (given the globally-nomadic nature of the primary beneficiaries of these interests, would it even be appropriate anymore to call them ‘national’ or ‘self’-interests?) which have proven themselves, collectively, a dead end for our working class these past thirty years. The results of our foreign policy (primarily under Bush) have weakened trust in our officials, both here and in the rest of the world.

An alternative is needed - a foreign policy which respects local economies both here and abroad, which uses aid money in smart, targeted ways using the Marshall Plan as a guiding framework (not just Sachs-style big pushes or Easterly-style rewards for adhering to a Washington Consensus ‘free’ market model) and which is characterised by aggressive charity. This alternative might be successfully articulated within the current Democratic Party, but it would require a significant overhaul of the party’s structure, and indeed, the entire rulebook for the way we do politics, starting with a reversal of the ill-conceived Citizens United SCotUS decision.

In the meantime, it is difficult to figure out what to do this time around, in terms of the Presidential election. Most likely, I will cast my vote for whomever the Green Party or Reform Party candidate is on my ballot.