Originally posted by: Arkaign
Truth ^. Painful but true. The (R)'s have fumbled their 'foreign policy' reputation
The good 'reputation' they have is pretty much undeserved, more marketing than history.
Pretty much the only Republican President who they can much rest on at all in the last century is Eisenhower, and that has more to do with his role in WWII than as President. As President, he started the US down the dark road of covert ops for overthrowing governments including democracies to install dictators, sometimes with assassinations, resulting in the coining of the term 'blowback' for the CIA's first covert op, overthrowing democracy in Iran to protect low oil prices, installing the Shah, not a proud moment.
Not to mention his overall allowing the Dulles brothers (Allen at CIA and John Foster as Secretary of State) pursue overly right-wing policies heightening the cold war and overly siiding blindly with Europe, supporting their wrongful policies of colonization aroud the world - including ignoring Vietname's request for the US to live up to its ideals and not let France re-colonize them. Instead, the US sided with France and eventually was paying 90% of France's Vietnam war costs, paving the way for our little problems there later.
Perhaps his greatest act on foreign policy was his farewell speech warning of the excessive growth of the military-industrial(-congressional) complex - anathema to modern Repubs.
Nixon of course misled the nation on his Vietnam policy, running on a 'secret plan' to end the war that was some nutty attempt to scare the Vietnamese into thinking he was nuts and would nuke them that didn't work, with his extending the war and secretly heading into Cambodia; yes, he went to China - after Eisenhower had told JFK he would not publically oppose him on foreign policy unless he did one thing, recognized China.
Ford? Do we talk about his secretly green-lightening Indonseia's brutal invasion of East Timor on his visit there, the invasion begun the day after he left, killling 250,000?
Or should we summarize it with his debate gaffe about Poland not being under Soviet dominance?
Reagan was a bigger disaster, from his School of the American training of terrorists throughout Central America, to his backing of death squads in nations he allied with (such as the ones who assassinated the Catholic archbishop and raped and murdered nuns) and terrorists in ones he opposed (Contras in Nicaragua), brilliantly subverting Congress' ban on such policies by illegally selling arms to Iran (!) through middle-man Israel (!!), further indebting the US to Israel, perhaps playing a role in his sending US Marines on Israel's behalf into their wrongful invasion of Lebanon, where they were promptly blown up and Reagan for all his tough talk quickly retreated; or his absurd invasion of Grenada for the crime of Governing while being Liberal, with plenty of lies and nonsensical pretext, or his gross squandering of opportunity as Grobachev led the USSR to dissolve and attempted to partner with the US on peace initiatives, and said Reagan had wasted a historic opportunity for arms control as Reagan refused to give up 'Star Wars'.
The first President Bush led the nation to an unjust war based on lies in Panama; he led the nation into an initially unpopular war in Iraq based on lies including the testimony to Congress by a woman of Iraqi troops taking hundreds of Kuwaiti babies out of incubators and leaving them on the floor - a woman who happened to be inventing the stories, later found to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador, with the whole disinformation campaign facilitated by the Kuwaiti government hiring a US advertising agency branch headed by Bush's former chief of staff. The chance to downsize the US military and return to a more traditional foreign policy now that the threats of Hitler and the USSR were gone, the 'peace dividend' after decades of heightened spending, was wasted.
Nothing need be said about GWB.
We could go back further, to Teddy Roosevelt's terribly wrongful occupation of the Phillippenes for apparently little more reason that as an exercise of our muscle (Wilson finally quietly ended it later as pointless), with hundreds of thousands of Phillippene civilians killed.
The source of the myth about Republcican strength rests largely on the fact that the Republicans, finding themselves unelectable when the nation saw democrats fix the nation whether following the Republian Great Depression or leading to victory in WWII, finally found an issue to run on - the red scare, accusing Democrats of being 'soft on communism', inventing bogeymen and playing on Americans' fear, the origin of the 'McCarthy era' and the John Birch Society, and later the 'Neocons'.
Not exactly a proud, legitimate source of 'foreign policy credential, but the weak people who are vulnerable to a strong-talking demagogue are big fans of the approach.
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