I’d like to answer this question:

The perception of Bush as inexperienced and unprepared on this front was not wrong. This is arguably more worrisome in Romney’s case because he appears to have no firm principles, which makes him more vulnerable to influence from his advisers, and because he usually has a reputation for being very detail-oriented in his understanding of other subjects. Bush was poorly informed about foreign affairs, but that was a function of his lack of intellectual curiosity. What accounts for Romney’s apparent lack of interest in a subject that he still can’t seem to stop bringing up? I don’t know, but I submit that it’s not a good sign.

I propose that this can be entirely explained by what we already know about Romney. We know already that Romney switched from being pro-choice to being pro-life due to a political need, but that process (as this Slate piece I’ve linked to before suggested) wasn’t one where Romney just decided one day that he wanted to be president and that he was changing his position to win votes. The piece makes it clear that ambition was the driving factor in the change, but not on a conscious level–it’s almost as though Romney supplied the goal and delegated the job of getting there to his brain, while still being able to maintain a consistent throughline.

Why couldn’t he have done the same with foreign policy? Daniel frequently notes that Romney’s complaints against Obama are all from 2009, but doesn’t this make sense if Romney was keyed into FOX News in 2009–a fair assumption–and heard over and over again that Obama was the worst foreign policy president ever and was using rapidly-forgotten detritus like, who knows, the Churchill’s bust incident, and that that was the goal he set his brain to get to? Obama’s foreign policy has hardly been perfect, but it has been perfectly bipartisan, and it’s hard to come up with a single action Obama took on foreign policy that ought to infuriate Republicans on general principle. The only thing that comes to mind are Obama’s intermittent attempts to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, which do deserve credit from us liberals as they count as one of those points where Obama was willing to swim upstream to accomplish a key progressive goal. But those efforts have not been entirely successful, and thus are of limited propaganda value. What else are you going to bash Obama about? His bipartisan Afghanistan policy? Repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell? Ending the Iraq War? Hell, there aren’t even very many obvious ways to hit Obama on not intervening in other nations’ affairs. He went into Libya, after all. He didn’t go into Iran or Syria (thank God!), so Romney has attacked him on those, of course. But after that, the pickings get thin.

So, the basic problem here for Romney is that he’s tried to perfectly mimic the Republican brand, particularly the FOX News variety. This includes a liberal amount of ignorant hawkery, and constructs a narrative of how Obama is, like, Jimmy Carter times a thousand, unable to face our enemies (USSR Iran), not being nice to our friends (The Shah Israel), and just won’t stop apologizing for America (when?). This narrative only makes sense if you ignore substantial portions of Obama’s record on foreign policy (and add a few things to them that didn’t happen), and the key themes of his record are (1) following through on winding down America’s wars, while (2) essentially continuing all of Bush’s security policies and building on them in several ways (e.g. drones, Libya), and (3) working with Republican and Democratic hawks, rather than, I don’t know, just outright saying we won’t bomb Iran. That’s a mixed bag, though it’s relatively hard for Republicans to argue with on the whole. Ultimately, I suspect Romney cares very little about this on an intuitive level because, as Larison notes, he hasn’t taken even the most basic steps to understand the situation or formulate any real vision. But he will keep shouting about it because he’s talked himself into thinking that the Honduras coup is one of the most important historical events ever, because the pundits on FOX were yammering about it right when he was forming his critiques of Obama for 2012, and he’s responsive to what his electorate wants, to say the least. Sure, Mitt Romney might not feel it matters deep down in his soul, but how could you? Honduras resolved all that years ago, it’s the deadest of horses. But Romney will shout about it for as long as he can. This is just a reminder that the idea that Mitt Romney will be some sort of sober, low-key technocrat in office is quite simply fanciful–a guy who can convince himself of the cosmic importance of such ephemeral twaddle is not someone you want anywhere near power.