Halfway

Halfway up the stairs
Isn’t up
And it isn’t down.
It isn’t in the nursery,
It isn’t in town.

For those of you who’ve just tuned in it’s likely that Mitt Romney will secure the number of delegates necessary for him to sew up the Republican nomination for the presidency next Tuesday. We will have reached the halfway point of the presidential election campaign process. The next quarter in that process will culminate with the party conventions and the final quarter will consist of both candidates running out the clock until the election in November.

As I have said any number of times before I vote for president almost entirely on the basis of foreign policy and the flip side of that coin, defense. For someone with my views on foreign policy the choice is particularly distressing. As the late Mayor Daley used to say, let’s look at the record.

Candidate Obama ran on bolstering the forces in Afghanistan, something that his opponent would undoubtedly have done as well. He was as good as his word. In 2008 the institutional momentum was pushing in the direction of counter-insurgency and under President Obama that is the policy we have followed. In my opinion it was an error but it was an error that would have occurred regardless of who was the resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC.

I strongly suspect that President Obama will continue to be as good as his word with respect to Afghanistan. I expect that the forces there will be drawn down gradually and that we will continue to have a military presence in Afghanistan into the indefinite future. I have no idea what President McCain would be saying at this point about Afghanistan.

I don’t believe that President Obama has made a convincing strategic case for our continued presence in Afghanistan to the American people. The polls certainly suggest that we are not convinced. I also expect that shortly after we withdraw our forces from Afghanistan Congress will withdraw U. S. funding from Afghanistan.

Guantanamo is still in operation; we have made increasing use of unmanned drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other areas around the world including Yemen. Osama bin Laden was killed. This was referred to as “bringing him to justice”, further blurring the line between counter-terrorism as warfare and counter-terrorism as law enforcement. I don’t believe that killing OBL had a great deal of strategic significance; the letters of his that have been released support his loss of operational control.

President Obama conformed to the terms of the Status of Forces Agreement negotiated under President Bush. The last U. S. troops left Iraq on December 16, 2011. The negotiated date was December 31, 2011. I would characterize that as “on time”, neither late nor early.

The Iranian regime continues to do its level best to convince its friends and enemies alike that it does, indeed, have a nuclear weapons development program and has just started another round of “Lucy and the football” with the international community over nuclear inspections. Obama’s approach to ending whatever nuclear program Iran is engaged in has not been successful but I don’t know that anybody else would have been more successful.

The best that can be said about the Libyan intervention that President Obama supported is that Qaddafi is no longer in charge there, no American lives were lost, and we don’t really know what the outcome will be. At this point it looks very much as though Libya is now being controlled by various militias and overthrowing Qaddafi may have had the unforeseen side effect of destabilizing Mali. As I said, we don’t really know what’s going to happen and, while not having boots on the ground does keep the cost of intervention down and avoids losing American lives it also cedes what little influence we might have had on how events unfold there. I continue to believe our intervention in Libya was an error. What would President McCain have done? President Romney? I have no idea.

Last fall President Obama gave three trade agreements that had been negotiated under the Bush Administration their final push through Congress. The president has his own Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement that he’s pushing. The Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations continues to have something in common with Generalissimo Franco. This is the sole area in which I suspect President Romney would be better than President Obama. However, a free trade agreement can be written on the back of a napkin; the thousands of pages of trade agreements that have been signed over the last twenty years aren’t. They merely change the terms of managed trade. Generally speaking, that change has been in our favor so the agreements are Good Things but real free trade would be even better.

Mitt Romney has made increased military spending part of his platform, something I think is unhinged.

In summary, over the last four years the Obama Administration has largely continued the policies of the last several years of the Bush Administration with the possible exception of Libya. He can hardly be said to have been “soft on defense”. To his detriment in my view but I recognize that I’m in the minority and to the best of my ability to determine President Romney would be even worse in that regard.

At this point using the primary yardstick I use for presidential candidates, Obama has the advantage. I can’t say I’m enthusiastic about his foreign policy. But I think he’s the lesser evil.