Former Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., a likely presidential candidate, has three things to say about President Obama’s proposal earlier this month to employ deeper cuts to the U.S. military: “Wrong signal, wrong effort, and wrong time.”
Santorum’s speech at the National Press Club on Thursday unveiling his expected foreign policy platform was nearly simultaneous with Obama’s announcement of CIA Director Leon Panetta as newly appointed Defense secretary, who is largely expected to execute the president’s defense cuts.
“Now is the time to not only be increasing our military preparedness but to finish the task of a comprehensive missile-defense system,” Santorum said. To abandon that goal in favor of “utopian ideas of a nuclear-free world” would be “both irresponsible and dangerous,” he added.
Arguing that Obama's choices abroad have “gone from bad to worse,” Santorum criticized the president for “dithering” in Libya, betraying longtime U.S. ally Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, and “opting for political correctness” in Middle Eastern affairs while Sharia law and jihadism surface as the “new existential threat to America.”
The problem, Santorum said, is Obama’s refusal to embrace American exceptionalism. “Americans are worried about our current foreign policy because it was reset in a series of apologies to the world for our past actions,” he said. “When a president goes to the U.N. or speaks abroad and apologizes for our country and her immediate past policies, we do not advance our security; we diminish our credibility.”
In a 10-point plan to “re-establish America’s standing in the world,” Santorum called on the government to fulfill its commitment to humanitarian aid, particularly in Africa, calling it a “pro-life foreign policy.”
“It is one of our best international investments,” he said, citing past U.S. relief in the form of AIDS prevention and anti-viral drugs, “especially considering less than 1 percent of our budget goes to such foreign aid.”
While Santorum tried to convince the audience that his credentials came from directing the Ethics and Public Policy Center's Program to Protect America's Freedom, he acknowledged to reporters that he has a history of supporting defense cuts while on the Senate Armed Services Committee.
“If you’ll look at my record, we found lots of savings in the Defense Department,” he conceded. “We made lots of defense cuts, most of which—unfortunately not all—were plowed back into reshaping our military.… My proposal would be to maintain the funds of the Defense Department, not cut it.” But Obama, he claimed, only wants to make budget cuts in defense spending, indicating that he “has his priorities upside down.”
Though the speech was billed as a “comprehensive” foreign policy address, Santorum failed to even mention Afghanistan, reasoning that in “a looking-forward speech,” he didn’t want to “get bogged down.”
Santorum said he will unveil a more detailed spending plan, including defense appropriations, when his presidential campaign matures.
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