Big Stick and America's Phallic foreign policy

For some reason, it looks like most of the republican candidates looked at the awful legacy of the Bush-Cheney administration's foreign policy and decided to double down on the worst aspects.  Torture prisoners, check, threaten sovereign nations with devastating firepower if they don't bend to our will, check; increase the size of our military to a level unmatched by the combined firepower of the rest of the world, check.   The scary part of this is the loving treatment this demented version of foreign policy gets from the national press.  It seems if we can't bomb our way to diplomatic success, the policy is a failure.  Thus our Syrian policy is an unmitigated disaster because we haven't killed enough innocent civilians with indiscriminate bombing and haven't lost any "boots on the ground" to enemy fire.   Chickenhawks like Jeb! and Trump vow to make us the arbiter of the world's fortunes by sheer force of our firepower.  Diplomacy is for sissies and Democrats!  Hopefully cooler heads will prevail, but I wouldn't count on it.  For republicans, nothing sells like absolutism, whether it is banning all abortions or bludgeoning friends and foes into submission.