Given Mitt Romney’s disastrous foreign policy forays to date, you might think that his handlers would put some some serious statesmanship, along with original and creative thought into his big foreign policy speech for the closing weeks of the presidential campaign. Alas, that would not be the case, as Ed Kilgore explains in this excerpt of his Washington Monthly post on the topic:

What’s most interesting about Romney’s foreign policy rap, other than its belligerant emptiness, is that it is so remarkably close to the underlying foreign policy principle of the Bush-Cheney administration, which treated the entire world as composed of small and unruly children whose most important need was for “resolve” and “discipline” from Big Daddy. I thought we abundantly learned in those years that “resolve” was a poor substitute for skillful diplomacy and a foreign policy/national security strategy a bit more complicated than “cross us and we’ll blow you up.” Romney does talk a lot, though not with any clear connection to the Middle East, about free trade. At a time when Americans are more than a little ambivalent about free trade, does he really think that is going to be our triumphant, self-evidently attractive formula for addressing the world’s or the Middle East’s problems?

Kilgore concludes that “it just brings back bad memories of The Decider and his sinister Vice President. Read the rest of Kilgore’s post here.