Mitt Romney Is M.A.D. (As In, Insane)

By Steve Hynd

Max Bergmann at The Wonk Room runs it down.

While Mitt Romney�s oped today in the Washington Post is largely a politically-motivated effort to boost his far-right foreign policy bonafides, it does however demonstrate how dangerous and extreme the anti-Obama narrative has become. That Mitt Romney�s oped attacking the New START Treaty in the Washington Post is full of distortions and false claims is not surprising. But what is really jaw-dropping however is Romney�s assessment that the treaty is Obama�s �worst foreign policy mistake.�

The fact that Romney thinks that the worst foreign policy mistake of the Obama administration is a modest treaty that reduces limits on nuclear weapons and extends and updates the verification and monitoring measures that Ronald Reagan himself negotiated in the initial START treaty, says something about how far out of the mainstream the conservative right has moved.

Read Bergmann's piece in its entirety as he runs down Romney's distortions and points out that the alternative to START is "nuclear anarchy". Obama has made many foreign policy mistakes - not least delegating too much of the tone of his foreign policy to the hawkish Clintonites and COINdinistas. But START is one of his few successes.

As was noted recently, Republicans see an opportunity to torpedo ratification of that success in the Senate and are doing so for entirely domestic political reasons. It takes 67 votes to ratify a treaty and the GOP has done the math and feels it can make political hay from preventing that. But that means they have to come up with some rationale that doesn't simply say "to make Obama look bad" as a fig-leaf of policy cover for a political move. Thus Romney, pandering to the neocon right for whom it's all about a de facto first-strike capability against Russia, rather than defending against entirely hypothetical nukes from Iran.

Romney doesn't even want a return to runaway Mutually assured Destruction. What he wants is something far more dangerous, even crazier. Romney wants runaway nuclear proliferation and a "Star Wars" style missile defense system that hypothetically gives the U.S. the ability to nuke without being nuked in return. The eventual consequence of his route is the planet as a smoking cinder in which the U.S. only loses a bit less than everyone else. It's a course only a neocon or someone impatient for The Rapture could love.