Whatever your opinion of Obama and Romney, one thing is
clear following Obama’s re-election as US President: we may breathe easily
insofar as Romney’s potentially disastrous approach to foreign affairs will not
now be realised. The Cold War will not be reanimated.
Romney posed as a patriot, and yet he had been instrumental
in the mass offshoring of US jobs; he presented himself as the international
strongman, advocating significant increases in defence spending, whilst
undermining the US economic base through his promotion of globalism and
domestic deindustrialisation. Romney either lacked the intellectual capacity to
recognise that Russia is not the US’s “main foe”, or cynically used Russia as a
convenient bogey, attempting to whip up a pointless Russophobia as a means of
harnessing the sense of domestic disquiet over the US’s geopolitical decline.
Mitt Romney has failed in his presidential challenge. The
nations of Europe will be safer as a consequence.
