RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/331115

Tonight, Governor Romney and President Obama will meet for a third and final debate before November 6, and this time the exclusive subject will be foreign policy. Mr. Romney should relish the opportunity, having wound up but failed to deliver a critical blow to the president’s credibility on the miasma in Benghazi during their second debate last week. The president was spared from having to fully account for the events of September 11, 2012, by a moderator whose on-the-spot “fact check” obscured more than it illuminated, and by Romney’s own apparent confusion in pressing the issue.

Romney cannot and should not make that mistake again. Nor should he be shy in questioning the president’s dubious record, in Benghazi or across the world.

That record began when the president delivered a series of addresses around the world shortly after taking office, a jaunt that fittingly enough came to be known as “the apology tour.” In France he criticized America’s past “arrogance” and its “dismissive . . . derisive” behavior. In Trinidad he lamented a “disengaged” United States that sought to “dictate . . . terms” in the hemisphere. At the National Archives he charged his predecessors with making foreign-policy decisions “based on fear rather than foresight” and “trimm[ing] facts and evidence to fit ideological predispositions.” Countries, even good ones, may sometimes need to apologize for specific mistakes. Generic national self-flagellation is another thing entirely, particularly when it is a form of personal self-congratulation.

But his dim view of America’s conduct of foreign affairs was not without Hope for Change. Obama allowed, at that year’s G-20 summit in London, “that with my election and the early decisions that we’ve made, that you’re starting to see some restoration of America’s standing in the world.” Unfortunately the president, like the Nobel Prize committee, expected his glowing personage to do far too much work in taming a dangerous and devolving world. His insufficiencies have instead become apparent in nearly every theater of U.S. interests abroad.

The liberalization of global trade has done more than any other force to lift the world’s worst-off out of poverty, and has benefited our economy as well. The president, ambivalent about trade and leading a coalition often hostile to it, has missed opportunity after opportunity to promote it. Mr. Obama and his party moved at glacial speed on three free-trade agreements negotiated during the Bush administration, and they are yet to complete a single trade agreement of their own. Indeed, the administration’s most consequential action on U.S. exports was to stimulate the number of guns illicitly smuggled into Mexico via Operation Fast and Furious, thus abetting the murderous designs of the barbaric drug cartels.

The administration’s prized “Russian Reset” was little more than a short circuit. Its great product was the New START — a Swiss-cheese treaty that reduces America’s strategic options while capping the number of deployed Russian nuclear warheads at a level that even a bellicose Putin, constrained by an aging arsenal and economic considerations, would struggle to meet in its absence. And still Russia oppresses at home (to the gulags for economic and political dissidents) and stymies abroad (stonewalling efforts to crack down on brutal regimes in Syria and Iran).

In Iran, in particular, the impact of tactical victories — won through electronic warfare and watered-down sanctions — has been limited by security leaks, real or perceived “daylight” between the U.S. and Israel, and Tehran’s alarmingly accurate sense that building nuclear warheads remains in their best interests. (Don’t, by the way, fall for the idea that a reported deal on direct talks between the U.S. and Tehran are a breakthrough: The Iranians would probably use such talks to play for more time.)

Next, consider the prosecution, and the dubious denouements, of America’s land wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. President Obama’s admirable decision to increase troop levels in the latter was, at least, consonant with a 2008 campaign that painted Afghanistan as the “Good War.” But as the scale of the challenge there waxed, the president’s commitment waned, and he let political considerations trump strategic prudence in his decision to mount a rapid withdrawal, complete with an expiration date on our combat mission in Afghanistan. In Iraq, just the opposite happened. The administration worked half-heartedly to secure a “Status of Forces Agreement” that would have allowed for a substantial and extended American military presence inside the country. But when Obama — and his crackerjack chief negotiator, Joseph R. Biden Jr. — failed to win such an agreement, the administration simply shrugged.

Then there is America’s most nebulous war, the broader War on Terror. Here the top line, understandably so, is the elimination of Osama bin Laden. While the president should be commended for making the difficult and wise decision to unleash America’s elite special operators on the butcher of Ground Zero, we remain vulnerable to the forces of Islamism, with near-misses from Detroit to Times Square attributable more to accidents of probability than sound policy. Indeed, the administration’s own instincts, thankfully checked by popular outrage, would have seen Khalid Sheikh Mohammed tried in Manhattan and the jihadists relocated from Gitmo to Thomson Correctional Center as a “shovel-ready” stimulus project for rural Illinois.

Which brings us back to Libya, the centerpiece of President Obama’s strategy of “leading from behind.” But as has happened with the broader Arab Spring — and, indeed, across the world — events in Libya have overtaken the administration’s reactive strategy. If the White House did not in fact mislead on the Benghazi timeline, then we are left with the equally depressing prospect that it naïvely wanted to believe the outrages were spontaneous. That it clung to a hypothesis that couldn’t pass the smell test for days and weeks after every reasonable observer concluded it couldn’t be true. That it inexcusably learned about the parlous security situation and the repeated requests for more manpower just as the rest of us did — too late.

The administration has contented itself with superficial “victories” that paper over deeper retreats: the Benghazi revisionism; the lemonade-from-lemons narratives on Iraq and Afghanistan; the empty parchments with Russia; the trade record and counterterror apparatuses borrowed, without attribution, from the Bush administration; the convenient, self-esteem-bolstering security leaks; the wringing of bin Laden’s death for all it was worth and more.

Taken together, this is the sort of record that might win an election, but could lose a century. It will be Mr. Romney’s task to make sure that it doesn’t.