“In GOP race,” proclaimed the New York Times’ headline
writers, “foreign policy is mainly a footnote.” On Friday, the
off-and-on frontrunner decided to prove the Gray Lady wrong.
Months before the first binding presidential vote, Mitt Romney
declared his first war. His foe, like Tim Pawlenty’s before him, is
“isolationism.”
The setting was a
major address at The Citadel, located in the crucial early
primary state of South Carolina, on the day Romney rolled out his
foreign policy team. If this collection of advisers resembled
George W. Bush’s, so did portions of the former Massachusetts
governor’s American century speech resemble Bush’s second inaugural
address.
“God did not create this country to be a nation of followers,”
Romney declared. “America is not destined to be one of
several equally balanced global powers. America must lead the
world, or someone else will.”
That someone else, Romney argued, is likely to have values less
conducive to human freedom than the United States. He continued:
“Without American leadership, without clarity of American purpose
and resolve, the world becomes a far more dangerous place, and
liberty and prosperity would surely be among the first
casualties.”
Romney rejected any cuts in the Pentagon budget. Military
spending, he said, must increase. He decried President Obama’s
foreign policy as “feckless,” and took a thinly veiled shot at his
less interventionist primary opponents. “This is America’s
moment,” he said. “We should embrace the challenge, not shrink from
it, not crawl into an isolationist shell, not wave the white flag
of surrender, nor give in to those who assert America’s time has
passed.”
“I will not surrender America’s role in the world. This is very
simple: If you do not want America to be the strongest nation on
Earth, I am not your president. You have that president today,”
Romney said.
Hard to believe that this was the same Mitt Romney John McCain
rebuked for seeming to equivocate about the surge during the 2008
campaign and appearing to want out of Afghanistan during this one.
During his Citadel speech Romney called for a review of the
Afghanistan war, which could result in either continuing or winding
down the decade-long conflict.
Alone among the top-tier Republican presidential candidates last
time around, Romney refused to answer questions about whether, in
hindsight, invading Iraq was the correct decision. Last week,
Romney told large swathes of Republican primary voters, as well as
the party’s defense and foreign policy establishments, what they
wanted to hear. But as continues to be the case with social issues,
there will be those who ask if this is the real Mitt Romney.
There is no mistaking who Romney plans to take his foreign
policy advice from. His 22-member team predictably drew heavily
from top aides to the last Republican president: counterterrorism
adviser Cofer Black, Dan Senor, spokesman for the Coalition
Provisional Authority, Meghan O’Sullivan, former Bush deputy
national security adviser on Iraq and Afghanistan, former Homeland
Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, and ex-CIA chief Michael
Hayden, to name a few. Liberal hawk Michael O’Hanlon of the
Brookings Institution praised
it as a “strong and diverse team.”
By speaking firmly and presenting a collection of seasoned
advisers, Romney reinforces a critique of Obama that resonates
among swing voters as well as conservatives: that the president is
green, indecisive, and uncomfortable with American power. It
recalls Dick Cheney’s 2000 campaign refrain to U.S. servicemen:
“Help is on the way.”
But weren’t there lessons, at least some of them chastening, to
be learned from the kind of help the Bush administration provided?
When they flirted with presidential bids, Haley Barbour, Mitch
Daniels, and Chris Christie, all governors, seemed to think there
were. Romney and Rick Perry, another governor, don’t seem to think
so and they are actually running.
Other questions arise. If isolationism is on the upswing, why is
the United States engaged in even more foreign wars than it was
under Bush? How does one tell the American people we are broke when
it comes to the entitlement programs polls show they still rather
like but we have plenty of money to continue the foreign
entanglements about which they have doubts?
The economist Herb Stein is often quoted as giving this simple
explanation of the federal budget: figure out how much it will cost
to defend the country, pay for it, and then see how much money is
left for everything else. It’s wiser advice than elected officials
have usually taken. Whether that entails perpetually accepting the
price tag for what Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan once called
“benevolent global hegemony” will be one of the great debates of
this presidential election.
Mitt Romney has told us, provisionally at least, where he comes
down on this question. He has also told us something else: the
demise of George W. Bush’s foreign policy is greatly
exaggerated.
