Santorum's Foreign Policy

Worse than Bush.  Here's Larison:

Peggy Noonan is the only mainstream conservative columnist I have read to state the obvious about Santorum:

But his weakest spot is foreign policy, where he is not thoughtful but reflexively hard-line. It is one thing to say, as all candidates do and must, that America must be strong, well defended, ready for any challenge. It is another to be aggressive, to be too burly, to be all George W. Bush and no George H.W. Bush.

In fact, Santorum goes far beyond Bush in aggressiveness, so this description doesn’t quite capture how bad his foreign policy is. One of the themes of his failed re-election bid was that the Bush administration was being too soft and was refusing to call the enemy by its true name. For Santorum, of course, the enemy was “Islamic fascism,” and Iran was at the heart of it. After the 2006 midterms, Rumsfeld resigned and Gates took his place, and virtually everyone saw as a good and necessary change. Not Santorum. After Gates was confirmed, this is what he had to say:

The president’s nomination of Gates, and the Senate’s passive and overwhelming support of him, shows that our leaders have not understood the peril we are in and are not prepared to win the war that is being waged against us.

Santorum was one of two Senators to vote against Gates’ confirmation.

Considering that the Gates appointment was probably Bush's best move other than ignoring Cheney the last few years in office, it is pretty poor that the soon-to-be also ran actually was one of two votes against confirmation.  Santorum was deservedly voted out of office in 2006, and only the religious loon-base would want to resurrect him.