When Mitt Romney faces off against President Obama on Tuesday night in the first of their debates to involve foreign policy, the Republican challenger will take a page from Ronald Reagan's playbook by attempting to portray the Democratic incumbent as the second coming of President Carter, and himself as the champion of the Gipper's "peace through strength" mantra.
A debate has raged for the past few months about what to call President Obama's Asian strategy. To be honest, it really doesn't matter whether you call the shift toward Asia a pivot, a refocus or a rebalancing.
Mitt Romney has assembled a foreign-policy platform rooted in the belief that adversaries such as Russia must be confronted for backsliding on democracy and that Israel must be supported in the face of common threats such as a nuclear-armed Iran.
The United States is the world's most powerful nation. Yet Washington is finding it harder than ever to achieve its ends. Consider Libya, where a campaign that was supposed to last just days is turning into a stalemate that could last weeks or months. So much for being a "superpower."
CHARM OFFENSIVE: HOW CHINA'S SOFT POWER IS TRANSFORMING THE WORLD
