Today in a column in The National Review, Mitt Romney foreign policy adviser John Bolton split with his candidate’s calls to arm the Syrian rebels, concluding that, “neither U.S. military assistance to the opposition nor current administration policy, which has stumbled from failure to failure over the past year, will advance legitimate American interests.”

Instead, Bolton urges observers not to be swayed by the “emotion” of Syrians being killed by President Bashar al-Assad’s forces. “The television images from Syria will not change permanently until the underlying strategic terrain changes permanently,” he says. Bolton proceeds to lay out his own set of policy proposals to remove Assad from power and ultimately overhaul U.S. foreign policy by taking intentionally provocative actions against Russia, China and Iran.

First, Bolton, who served as George W. Bush’s ambassador to the U.N., suggests that “we should cut Syria off from its major supporters” in Iran, China and Russia. He proposes:

We should resume full-scale, indeed accelerated, efforts to construct the limited missile-defense system designed by George W. Bush to protect American territory not against Russia but against rogue states such as Iran and North Korea. [...] We should also announce our withdrawal from the New START arms-control treaty, and our utter disinterest in negotiations to prevent an “arms race” in space. Let Moscow and Beijing think about all that for a while.

Indeed, Bolton acknowledges that such actions “would likely break the famous ‘reset’ button [with Russia] beyond repair.” And his tearing up of the START treaty, constructing an expensive and provocational missile-defense system, and kicking off an “arms race” in space would undeniably leave Moscow and Beijing scratching their heads.

Bolton again reiterated his standard lines on Iran, calling for regime change and an end to diplomatic efforts on Iran’s nuclear program.

As for Syria itself, Bolton has said the U.S. should have turned toward Damascus once Baghdad fell in 2003. But his only solution now is to find and support “Syrian rebel leaders who are truly secular and who oppose radical Islam; who will disavow al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and other terrorist groups; and who will reject Russian and Iranian hegemony over their country.”

Bolton’s hawkishness is nothing new but the New York Times’s David Sanger suggested that Bolton may have a prominent role in crafting Mitt Romney’s foreign policy positions. Sanger reported that the Romney campaign’s foreign policy rhetoric last month, “sounds more like the talking points of the neoconservatives — the ‘Bolton faction,’ as insiders call the group led by John Bolton.”

By Nina Liss-Schultz

Despite the cloud of secrecy in which the United States’ drone program is shrouded, U.S. officials continue to maintain that drone strikes are an essential and beneficial part of U.S. counterterrorism strategy. But questions have been raised about the drone program, particularly related civilian casualties, potential blowback and the relative ease with which to deploy a drone versus a piloted aircraft.

But House Homeland Security Committee chairman Peter King (R-NY), in a CNN interview on Sunday, said he’s “not concerned” about the program’s negative fallout, particularly civilian casualties, adding that the U.S. drone policy is one “righteousness and goodness“:

KING: I’m not concerned [with the casualty rate]. My belief is that when you are in a war — and we are in a war — the idea is to kill as many of the enemy as you can with minimal risk of life to your own people.

…I wish we could all live in a world where we could hold hands and love each other. The fact is, that’s not reality. We have an enemy that wants to kill us. I live in New York. I lost 150 constituents on 9/11, and if we can save the next 150 by killing al Qaeda terrorists with drones then kill them.

There’s evil people in the world. Drones aren’t evil, people are evil. We are a force of good and we are using those drones to carry out the policy of righteousness and goodness.

Raw Story has the video:

While King may not be worried about the collateral damage, or civilian deaths of drone strikes, the strikes do carry with them unintended consequences. For example, last year, two young Pakistani civilians were killed by drone strikes 200 yards from their family’s home. And as CNN’s Candy Crowley noted in her interview with King, an analysis by the New America Foundation found that, since 2004, drone strikes have had a 17 percent civilian casualty rate in northwest Pakistan alone. The study reports that there was an estimated total of 302 strikes in the area between 2004 and 2012, adding up to nearly 500 civilian deaths.

There is also evidence that the drone program could have a negative impact on U.S. security. The U.S. program in Yemen is one example in which the strikes can backfire. The Washington Post recently reported that the “escalating campaign of U.S. drone strikes” in Yemen “is stirring increasing sympathy for al-Qaeda-linked militants and driving tribesman to join a network.” The recent standstill at the NATO summit between President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan and President Obama was a direct result of the U.S. use of drones.

In the late 1940s, Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg famously said that “politics stops at the water’s edge.” In recent years, adherence to the axiom has fallen by the wayside. In 2005, President Clinton criticized the sitting Bush administration in a Dubai speech. And President Obama delivered a 2008 speech to cheering throngs in Berlin during a presidential race. But Obama’s Berlin speech focused on policy issues and avoided criticizing his Republican opponent Sen. John McCain (AZ) or the waning Bush administration.

This weekend, however, the Romney campaign took politics overseas in a much more explicit fashion: dispatching two advisers to foreign publications amid an established one-on-one presidential race to heavily criticize President Obama by name and build their case that Mitt Romney should be president.

In one of the salvos against President Obama, Romney economic adviser Glenn Hubbard took to the pages of the German business magazine Handelsblatt to sharply criticize the administration’s stance on the European fiscal crisis. According to a translated portions of the article in the New York Times, Hubbard lambasted Obama’s “ignorance of the causes of the crisis and of a growth trend in the future,” calling the president “unwise.” After taking the president to task by name, Hubbard contrasted him with Romney:

Mitt Romney, Obama’s Republican opponent, understands this very well and advises a gradual fiscal consolidation for the U.S.: structural reform to stimulate growth.

According to the Times, the Obama campaign already took a shot at Hubbard’s op-ed:

In a foreign news outlet, Governor Romney’s top economic adviser both discouraged essential steps that need to be taken to promote economic recovery and attempted to undermine America’s foreign policy abroad.

The second overseas assault on President Obama came from Romney foreign policy adviser Amb. Richard Williamson. Speaking to the Israeli daily Haaretz, Williamson zeroed in on Obama’s Iran and Israel policies. “Under Barack Obama, our national security capabilities have decreased,” he said, blasting “President Obama’s feckless and ineffective leadership.” He went on:

What the Governor has tried to make clear is that one of the unfortunate results of the Obama foreign policy is our friends and allies, including Great Britain, Israel and others, have not had their interests taken into account, have not been consulted closely, and there isn’t a constructive working relationship.

The claims are baseless. Indeed, Romney and his advisers are the ones who last month publicly trashed Great Britain, its leaders, and other European allies. And Williamson’s claim that “there isn’t a constructive working relationship” with Israel belie a reality where Israeli leaders like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu note that Obama “rightly said that our security cooperation is unprecedented,” and Defense Minister Ehud Barak said Obama is an “extremely strong supporter of Israel in regard to its security” and that no one should “raise any question mark about the devotion of this president to the security of Israel.”

With direct political attacks being waged overseas, the 1940s and Vandenberg are clearly in the rearview. But perhaps at least the Romney campaign could do America — and the world — a favor by maintaining a modicum of honesty in their attacks on Obama launched from overseas.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is one of the GOP’s staunchest defenders of the Pentagon’s bloated budget. Last week, while on a tour against the ten year $600 billion mandatory military spending cuts if Congress fails to agree on a debt reduction plan, Graham indicated that he was willing to cross a major Republican red line and raise taxes to help stave off the military spending reductions. The New York Times reported Graham as saying “the sentiment for raising revenues by closing tax loopholes or imposing higher fees on items like federal oil leases is expanding in his party.”

Graham said he “crossed the Rubicon” on a pledge against tax hikes organized by anti-tax advocate and conservative power-broker Grover Norquist. But the South Carolina Republican has since made a 180-degree shift.

By Friday, Graham had reversed his position, reports U.S. News & World Report. A “senior Graham aide” said:

[Graham] in favor of increased revenue, but there are ways to do that without raising tax rates. Closing loopholes and deductions in the tax code will bring in revenue, and that is what Senator Graham was talking about.

Graham’s fallback to claiming he was just talking about “closing loopholes and deductions” hardly matches up with his statements earlier in the same week that he had “crossed the Rubicon” on the GOP’s no new taxes pledge. His reversal is perhaps more likely the result of finding few allies in either party for preserving defense spending levels by raising taxes.

“That’s what it appears Graham was up to,” said CAP’s Lawrence Korb, “But no one went with him. So the fallback is to say you were talking about closing loopholes. That’s how you get around the pledge.”

“We don’t need to be raising taxes for defense or for any other reason,” Rep. John Campbell (R-CA) told U.S. News. “What we need is to reform the tax system.” And Graham found little support from Democrats who have often found themselves at odds with DOD budget hawks and the GOP’s insistence on raising revenues through cutting needed public services for the poor.

“What we need is to reform the tax system,” White House press secretary Jay Carney told reporters last week, refusing to “cheer” Republicans, such as Graham, who are only willing to defect on their tax cuts pledge in order to preserve the defense budget.

Graham’s views on preserving U.S. military spending levels, which have more than doubled over the last decade, is at odds with the American public.

A poll conducted last month by the Center for Public Integrity found that that when shown the discretionary budget for national defense alongside the discretionary budgets for education, veterans’ benefits, homeland security and various other spending areas, 65 percent of respondents found Defense spending to be more than what they had expected.