Huntsman: Obama Overextends on Foreign Policy

Most of the Republican presidential candidates have criticized President Barack Obama for pushing a weak foreign policy. But former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman chastises him for going overboard, The American Conservative reports.

Huntsman, who also was Obama’s ambassador to China until resigning to seek the GOP nod for president, has blasted the president’s military intervention in Libya for having “no defined goal, no defined national security interest, no exit strategy.”

He has questioned the value of military bases in Germany and Japan.

And in Afghanistan, rather than keeping 100,000 troops there, we should focus on “intelligence-gathering capability, a special-forces presence, and helping to train the Afghan-national troops,” Huntsman said. Republicans have to “rethink foreign entanglements.”

But he insists that he’s not an isolationist. “They [his critics] haven’t been on the other side of the negotiating table with the Chinese,” he told The American Conservative. “They clearly haven’t felt our diminished leverage in the international marketplace because of our weak core here at home.”