Johnson: Naming foreign leaders doesn’t qualify one for presidency

Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson argued Friday that knowing geography and being able to name foreign leaders doesn’t qualify someone to dispatch the U.S. military to another country.
 
“Because you can dot the I’s and cross the T’s on names of foreign leaders or geographic locations, then that qualifies you to put the military in a situation where the military is dying?” Johnson asked during his appearance at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, according to Politico.

{mosads}”We’ve got military personnel that are dying, they’re getting hurt, they’re getting maimed for the rest of their lives. They’re getting psychologically damaged for the rest of their lives because we put them in a situation of a crossfire. And in that crossfire there are hundreds of thousands of people dying in these countries,” Johnson said.

“So if that’s the qualification to be president, dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s on the names of foreign leaders and geographic locations, and because that’s the quality that you have to posses, well, just count on the military policies of this country continuing as they’ve been the last 15 years going forward,” he said.

Johnson has said he had a hard time identifying a foreign leader he admires, following his gaffe late last month where he struggled to name one during a television appearance.

The former New Mexico governor delivered his speech Friday at the University of Chicago to address concerns about his grasp of foreign policy after blanking during a separate TV interview last month when asked about Aleppo, a focal point for the conflict in Syria. He has been sliding in the polls amid the bad publicity. 

Johnson described himself as a “skeptic” of military intervention during his speech Friday, citing the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, the years-long war in Afghanistan and the effect of the invasion of Iraq on the relationship with NATO ally Turkey, which forced it to go “south.”

Johnson referred to himself as a chess player, with attention to long-term strategy, while likening U.S. foreign policy over the last 15 years to “a series of erratic chess moves.”

“We need a chess player in the White House. More important, we need a policy guided by principle, not politics,” he said in prepared remarks.