Your third problem is that you risk being seen by voters as some kind of foreign diplomat. All this talk of "multilateralism" and getting on with "our friends," the French and Germans, undercuts your cautiously constructed patriotic appeal and also sounds a tad unrealistic. After all, the French and Germans are not exactly lining up to cooperate with the United States. The voters may notice that.
Marc Plattner, editor of the Journal of Democracy, pointed out at a Lisbon conference of the Institute for Political Studies of the Catholic University there that the term "multilateralism," as employed by Europeans, no longer means inter-governmental cooperation but the subordination of nation states, including the United States, to the decisions of international bodies.
The quote is about half of what Kerry is about, the other half is pure evil if you ask me.