Romney Talks War Stuff Without Actually Promising More Wars, What A Wuss

Oh, boy, a Republican presidential candidate just went to give a “major foreign policy address” to a military academy, which as we all know means a whole lot of highly explosive murder-death, for freedom, right? Well, sorry carnage lovers, your 2012 GOP nominee isn’t the sort of guy who, say, makes up comical “Weird” Al-style song spoofs about dropping bombs on other countries and killing tens of thousands of people. Nope! You’re stuck with Mitt Romney, who comes from a modern-day executive class that believes the answer to everything is “leadership,” and that you can learn “leadership” by reading the executive summaries of all the terrible business books with “leadership” in the title, and that liberal weenies who’ve never run a business don’t understand “leadership,” and that what the world wants is more American “leadership,” from a real “leader,” Mitt Romney. “Fuck this noise,” you’re saying, “Who will America bomb, under President Romney? WHO?” Details after the jump, but … maybe nobody? BOOO.

So go ahead and read all five pages of Mitt’s remarks to VMI if you hate yourself, but trust us when tell you that here are all the specific things Romney promises to do to and/or with foreigners (vague hand-wavey bullshit about “leadership” and “clarity” and “helping promote freedom” and whatever excepted):

• Iran’s leaders will be put “on notice” about nukes! There will be new sanctions, and tighter old sanctions! And aircraft carriers will be moved closer to Iran!
• America will be even better friends with Israel, and “deepen our critical cooperation” with our “partners in the Gulf,” bleah, that was kind of hand-wavey bullshit, wasn’t it, but we are assuming this all means arms sales.
• He’ll get rid of “Obama’s” cuts to the military, by which he means the “sequestering” cuts that Congress agreed to in its debt ceiling suicide pact a couple years back.
• More boats! 15 more boats a year for the Navy, hooray!
• Vladimir Putin is a jerk, so we’re going to build some sweet-ass missile defense systems. Also, we will make everyone else in NATO spend more on their military, somehow.
• America will only give foreign aid to countries that “meet the responsibilities of every decent modern government — to respect the rights of all of their citizens, including women and minorities … to ensure space for civil society, a free media, political parties, and an independent judiciary,” which is something every single president says he’ll do until he suddenly realizes that he very much needs something that a minor-league despot has, a discovery that generally occurs around day three of every administration. Egypt in particular doesn’t get money unless it plays nice.
• Speaking of things every president says, despite what you might have heard, Mitt Romney is totally going to figure out a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “In this old conflict … only a new President will bring the chance to begin anew,” Romney said, and everyone who has ever been a new President since 1948 laughed at him, from the special Presidents Only room in hell.
• Free trade agreements! We’ll sign a bunch.
• We’re 100% going to sell some guns and shit to “those members of the [Syrian] opposition who share our values.” We’re sure they’ll be easy to find! Remember those Afghan mujahideen, and how they shared our values in the fight against Communism, so we sold them a bunch of weapons? That went great.
• And speak of the devil, what about the war we’re actually fighting, in Afghanistan? Mitt Romney will “pursue a real and successful transition to Afghan security forces by the end of 2014,” but then right after that he says that Obama’s promise to do the same thing is just a “politically timed retreat.” But when Romney does it, it will be leadership, and also he won’t do it if the generals tell him not to. Still, he’ll probably be able to do it on his schedule, because he’ll win the war, because, once again, leadership.

So there you have it: it’s like he barely wants to bomb anybody at all! Just maybe sail some boats at people and sell guns to some other people. Still, at least one American hero was so deeply moved by the speech that he felt compelled to type into his Twitter machine, while standing up at his desk:

Donald Rumsfeld will now only endorse people or policies in ways that direct pageviews to places where he can advertise his cleverly titled book. [WP]