Via TPM: “Romney managed to insult his British hosts, knocking their management of the Summer Olympics in comparison to his run with the Salt Lake City Olympics in 2002.” Prime Minister Cameron is none too pleased.

I have no doubt we’re getting a glimpse of Mitt’s foreign policy in advance. Romney has taken some heat both for what he’s said and what he hasn’t on the subject, but there has been some debate about whether he’s just saying it to please the base or whether he believes it. After this incident, it seems pretty clear that Romney just doesn’t have much interest in diplomacy at all. Romney has committed a number of gaffes in this campaign, but typically they’re gaffes where he goes overboard trying to ingratiate himself with whatever target he’s aiming for. Saying that you ran the Olympics better than the current team furthers his campaign’s bizarre belief that his running of the Olympics matters to voters, and insults a long-time ally that he’s supposedly trying to befriend, but there’s no pandering element to it that I’m aware of. My instinct would be to say that Romney’s “credential-burnishing” tour is probably intended to give Mitt plenty of opportunities to be rude to foreign leaders that conservatives don’t like as some sort of weird nationalist play for their affections (which would be sort of a natural follow-through after Romney’s silly VFW speech), except conservatives don’t hate Britain or Cameron. So I don’t make this as pandering to them. Then what? Romney’s gaffe here is one of burnishing his own ego, not of pandering to the group he’s in front of. Which leaves only the interpretation that he doesn’t care about handling foreign policy, outside of the red meat nationalistic parts that he can use to make conservative voters happy. It wouldn’t have taken much effort for Romney not to say this, but he did.

What is deliciously ironic about this is that Romney frequently talks about how President Obama has insulted American allies, which isn’t true of him, but now is true of Romney. Nobody outside the wingularity cared about returning Churchill’s bust or whatever, but to my knowledge no UK leader has never slammed Obama in this kind of way. All the more proof that we ought to expect a Romney Administration to have a foreign policy similar to the one he’s outlined, perhaps combined with some of the fictitious criticisms he’s made of Obama. No wonder he wants to increase military spending!