Still recovering from his Aleppo moment and not being able to name a foreign leader he admired, the libertarian presidential candidate has come up with a novel argument: Ignorance about foreign policy means less wars. Pressed by Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC, Johnson said:
You know what? The fact that somebody can dot the Is and cross the Ts on a foreign leader or a geographic location, that then allows them to put our military in harm’s way. We wonder why our men in service and women suffer from PTSD in the first place. We elect people who can dot the I’s and cross the T’s on these names and geographic locations as opposed to the underlying philosophy which is, let’s stop getting involved in these regime changes.
We need only think back to the previous president to realize that someone can be incredibly ignorant about the world, as George W. Bush was, and still support regime change. The problem with Bush wasn’t that he could “dot the I’s and cross the T’s” but that he pushed for foolish interventions that were also badly executed. But Johnson is so intent on defending his own ignorance that he doesn’t realize this simple point.