Five Favorite Foreign Policy Debate Gaffes

Source: AP

Monday’s debate on foreign policy marked the end of the presidential debate season for 2012.  Much has been said about past gaffes — both in foreign policy debates and in general — but we’re going to take some time now anyway to reflect on what could have, and what did, go horribly wrong in this most recent debate.

So let’s kick it off with something recent.  And, no, it’s not the 42 allies you may have come to expect.

Romney’s Water Problem

Seeing as Iran and Syria have been making headline news for quite some time now, we ought to know its geography like the back of our hand.  For strategic purposes, it’s often good to know where your foremost geopolitical threat is and the terrain surrounding it.

“Wait, where am I supposed to be attacking?”

Yes, Obama has had his delight gaffes at times — 58 states, anyone?  However, Romney pulled one off in the middle of the third and final presidential debate, which also happened to be on foreign policy.

Mitt Romney: Syria is Iran’s only ally in the Arab world. It’s their route to the sea. It’s the route for them to arm Hezbollah in Lebanon, which threatens, of course, our ally, Israel. And so seeing Syria remove Assad is a very high priority for us. (n.b., problematic piece in bold letters)

Iran has no route to the sea.  They must go through Syria.  They cannot do anything else.  Hell, Iran doesn’t border any water, right?  It’s desert — barren, full of sand, and amazing for shooting stock photographs of men with iPads, right?

Wrong.

Where’s the sea? Oh right…

Syria may be Iran’s simplest route to the Mediterranean Sea, but it’s clearly not Iran’s only route to a sea. In fact, Iran has two borders on the sea — its north and south borders.  It has a network of rivers.  Actually, it’s pretty fertile land.  Why anyone would bother to pass through Syria is beyond, well, anyone with the notable exception of Bing or Mapquest that one time it told me to drive into a brick wall.

Mom and Dad, I’m really sorry the insurance rate went up because of this, but my GPS told me to do it…

Amy Carter vs. Nuclear Proliferation

Amy Carter when she came to the forefront of political stardom as a quoted advisor to her father, Jimmy Carter.  According to her father,

“I had a discussion with my daughter, Amy, the other day, before I came here, to ask her what the most important issue was,” he told the audience. “She said she thought nuclear weaponry and the control of nuclear arms.”

Unfortunately for Jimmy, Amy was 13-years-old.

Please, advisors should be old enough to at least get their permit.

Carter’s gaffe was a huge selling point for Reagan’s 1980 Presidential Campaign.  Whether you love or hate Reagan, it’s hard to hate on him for mocking Carter’s comment — after all, Carter unwittingly pulled out his white flag right then and there and began waving it aggressively at the Republican presidential candidate.  Thus, Reagan gleefully asserts that if Amy is so concerned about nuclear proliferation, she should be pro-Reagan.

Yet the point people really should take away from this is how great it is to finally have teenagers pushing for solutions to real issues.  Even though Amy Carter was not at the pinnacle of political charm in her early years, we should give her at least some credit for saying “nuclear proliferation” and not “Monday quizzes in school” or “curfews.”

Ford’s Russia Problem

If you are currently breathing and/or zombie Reagan, you’ll probably know that Soviet domination was a huge concern for the West.  Hell, the U.S. and Russia had a whole “cold” war about it! And an arms race. And a space race. And some weird exchanges.

In other words, we all know about the Soviets. Gerald Ford also wanted us to brush up on our knowledge of the militant Communist Manifesto-thumping counterparts like many presidents and policy makers in the period between the mid-1940s and the fall of the USSR.  Unfortunately for him, he wasn’t sure how far Soviet power actually extended.

If you’re too lazy to watch the YouTube clip, Ford says that, “There’s no Soviet domination in Eastern Europe.”  Had he left it at that, it could have been somewhat defensible.  Maybe he misspoke.  Maybe he didn’t have enough coffee.  Maybe he actually visited these countries and discovered they didn’t have the systematic toilet paper shortages or surpluses associated with central planning. But the diatribe continues,

“I don’t believe, Mr. Frankel, that the Yugoslavians consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. I don’t believe that the Romanians consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. I don’t believe that the Poles consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. Each of those countries is independent, autonomous; it has its own territorial integrity. And the United States does not concede that those countries are under the domination of the Soviet Union. As a matter of fact, I visited Poland, Yugoslavia, and Romania, to make certain that the people of those countries understood that the President of the United States and the people of the United States are dedicated to their independence, their autonomy, and their freedom.”

Ford seemed to assume, for God knows what reason, that the “autonomous” governments that were behind the Iron Curtain and locked into the Warsaw Pact were truly independent. Both Poland and Romania were, technically speaking, autonomous as satellite states — they had parliaments, constitutions and elections — but all of this was tightly monitored by the Kremlin. Resistance to the Soviets was neutralized; Stalinist systems were implemented in all the countries.

No Soviet influence here!  Nope! None.

Perhaps the only part where he can be given the benefit of the doubt is his comment on Yugoslavia, but even after the Tito-Stalin split in 1948, it’s hard to be completely uninfluenced by a major power with satellite states bordering you or when you almost go to war with Russia, only to be saved by a drunken Khrushchev.

He tried to save face later on by stating,”I felt very strongly that regardless of the number of Soviet armored divisions in Poland, the Russians would never dominate the Polish spirit. That’s what I should have said. I simply left out the fact that, at that time in 1976, the Russians had about 10 to 15 divisions in Poland.”  Whoops.

Ross Perot’s Giant Sucking Sound

Clinton jokes aside, Perot is pretty much the 1990s political punching bag.  Along with “Let me finish,” he became the posterboy avoidable — and politically deadly — gaffes.

Here’s the relevant piece:

“To those of you in the audience who are business people, pretty simple: If you’re paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, hire young — let’s assume you’ve been in business for a long time and you’ve got a mature work force — pay a dollar an hour for your labor, have no health care — that’s the most expensive single element in making a car — have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don’t care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south.”

Not surprisingly — even despite America’s obsession with the dangers of sending labor to India and China — the term “giant sucking sound” has not returned in the 2012 election.  Were Obama to start quoting Perot, the Romney campaign would immediately send off a series of emails, YouTube videos and commercials blasting the POTUS.  Understandably, a similar reaction would probably come from the Obama administration.

Between the fact that he was an independent candidate, his general demeanor  his gaffes, and the ease of parodying him on SNL, Perot never really recovered.  If anything, he’s become more and more like this guy:

“If you don’t give me back my stapler, you’ll hear a giant sucking sound coming to take your job away!”

No Longer a Dole Man

Americans are quick to forget.  Twenty years before Bob Dole’s 1996 campaign, he successful offended the free world on Ford’s ticket in 1976.  While this isn’t a strictly foreign policy debate moment per se, it deserves to be mentioned.  Bob Dole isn’t the only one who enjoys mock- ahem, I mean, talking about himself.

In brief, Dole claims, “I figured it up the other day…If we added up the killed and wounded in Democrat wars in this century, it would be about 1.6 million Americans — enough to fill the city of Detroit.”

It’s worth noting that the anti-communist foreign policy that lead to the Vietnam War was pretty much bipartisan.  Eisenhower’s, a Republican, Cold War foreign policy was inherited by Kennedy.  Similarly, Senator Wayne Morse, the man who tried stop Johnson’s escalation in Vietnam by attempting to start an investigation into the USS Maddox attack in 1964 after hearing the information the U.S. government received may have not been totally credible, was a Republican gone Democrat.

The worst bit ought to be fairly clear: Dole’s comment on World War II as a Democrat war. Sure, it was a Democrat’s war in the sense that a Democrat was in power, but that’s it.  Perhaps a more damning comment would have been pointing out that the MS St. Louis was turned back to Europe under the authority of a Democrat, but that seems to be far beyond the depth of Bob Dole’s critique here.