It’s safe to say that foreign policy was not the strong suit of this
year’s contenders for the GOP presidential nomination. Rick Perry
labeled the Turkish government “Islamic terrorists.” Newt Gingrich
referred to Palestinians as “invented” people. Herman Cain called
Uzbekistan “Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan” and memorably blanked when
asked what he thought of NATO’s incursion into Libya. Michele Bachmann
pledged to close the US embassy in Iran, which hasn’t existed since
1980. Rick Santorum gave a major foreign policy speech at a Jelly Belly
factory in California.
Yet though the candidates and their views were often hard to take
seriously, their statements on foreign policy reflected a more
disturbing trend in the GOP. Despite facing a war-weary public, the
candidates—with the exception of Ron Paul, an antiwar libertarian, and
Jon Huntsman, a moderate internationalist—positioned themselves as
unapologetic war hawks. That included Mitt Romney, marginally more
polished than his rivals but hardly an expert. Given Romney’s
well-established penchant for flip-flopping and opportunism, it’s
difficult to know what he really believes on any issue, including
foreign affairs (the campaign did not respond to a request for comment).
But a comprehensive review of his statements during the primary and his
choice of advisers suggests a return to the hawkish, unilateral
interventionism of the George W. Bush administration should he win the
White House in November.
Romney is loath to mention Bush on the campaign trail, for obvious
reasons, but today they sound like ideological soul mates on foreign
policy. Listening to Romney, you’d never know that Bush left office
bogged down by two unpopular wars that cost America dearly in blood and
treasure. Of Romney’s forty identified foreign policy advisers, more
than 70 percent worked for Bush. Many hail from the neoconservative wing
of the party, were enthusiastic backers of the Iraq War and are
proponents of a US or Israeli attack on Iran. Christopher Preble, a
foreign policy expert at the Cato Institute, says, “Romney’s likely to
be in the mold of George W. Bush when it comes to foreign policy if he
were elected.” On some key issues, like Iran, Romney and his team are to
the right of Bush. Romney’s embrace of the neoconservative cause—even
if done cynically to woo the right—could turn into a policy nightmare if
he becomes president.
If we take the candidate at his word, a Romney
presidency would move toward war against Iran; closely align Washington
with the Israeli right; leave troops in Afghanistan at least until 2014
and refuse to negotiate with the Taliban; reset the Obama
administration’s “reset” with Russia; and pursue a Reagan-like military
buildup at home. The
Washington Monthly dubbed Romney’s foreign
policy vision the “more enemies, fewer friends” doctrine, which is
chillingly reminiscent of the world Obama inherited from Bush.
In March the Rev. Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention
told the Romney campaign it could win over “recalcitrant conservatives,”
reported the
Washington Post, by “previewing a few Cabinet
selections: Santorum as attorney general, Gingrich as ambassador to the
United Nations and John Bolton as secretary of state.” That suggestion,
which might seem ludicrous, not to mention terrifying, is more
plausible than one might think.
In December Gingrich pledged at a forum sponsored by the Republican
Jewish Coalition that he would appoint Bolton to run Foggy Bottom. But
the mustachioed
über-hawk, who was a controversial under
secretary of state for arms control and UN ambassador in the Bush
administration, endorsed Romney instead. Bolton has since campaigned
energetically for him, serving as a key surrogate on national security
issues. “Many conservatives hope that [will] include accepting a senior
national security post in a Romney administration,” wrote Jennifer
Rubin, a neoconservative blogger for the
Post.
Few advisers personify the pugnacity of Romney’s foreign policy team
better than Bolton. He has been a steadfast opponent of international
organizations and treaties and seems never to have met a war he didn’t
like. Shortly before the invasion of Iraq, he told Israeli officials
that Syria, Iran and North Korea would be the next US targets. Over the
past few years Bolton has been an outspoken proponent of an Israeli
attack on Iran. “Mitt Romney will restore our military, repair relations
with our closest allies and ensure that no adversary—including
Iran—ever questions American resolve,” Bolton said when endorsing
Romney. “John’s wisdom, clarity and courage are qualities that should
typify our foreign policy,” Romney responded.
* * *
Romney knew little about foreign policy when he ran for president in
2008. An internal dossier of John McCain’s presidential campaign said at
the time that “Romney’s foreign affairs resume is extremely thin,
leading to credibility problems.” After being branded as too liberal by
conservative GOP activists four years ago, Romney aligned himself with
Bolton and other neocons in 2012 to protect his right flank. Today
there’s little daylight between the candidate and his most militant
advisers. “When you read the op-eds and listen to the speeches, it
sounds like Romney’s listening to the John Bolton types more than anyone
else,” says Brian Katulis, a senior fellow for national security at the
Center for American Progress. (The Romney campaign’s openly gay foreign
policy spokesman, Richard Grenell, who had been an indefatigable
defender of Bolton as the latter’s PR flack in the Bush years, was
forced to resign after harsh attacks by anti-gay conservatives.)
Bolton is one of eight Romney advisers who signed letters drafted by
the Project for a New American Century, an influential neoconservative
advocacy group founded in the 1990s, urging the Clinton and Bush
administrations to attack Iraq. PNAC founding member Paula Dobriansky,
leading advocate of Bush’s ill-fated “freedom agenda” as an official in
the State Department, recently joined the Romney campaign full time.
Another PNAC founder, Eliot Cohen, counselor to Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice from 2007 to 2009, wrote the foreword to the Romney
campaign’s foreign policy white paper, which was titled, perhaps not
coincidentally, “An American Century.” Cohen was a tutor to Bush
administration neocons. Following 9/11, he dubbed the war on terror
“World War IV,” arguing that Iraq, being an “obvious candidate, having
not only helped Al Qaeda, but…developed weapons of mass destruction,”
should be its center. In 2009 Cohen urged the Obama administration to
“actively seek the overthrow” of Iran’s government.
The Romney campaign released the white paper and its initial roster
of foreign policy advisers in October, to coincide with a major address
at The Citadel. The cornerstone of Romney’s speech was a gauzy defense
of American exceptionalism, a theme the candidate adopted from another
PNAC founder and Romney adviser, Robert Kagan. The speech and white
paper were long on distortions—claiming that Obama believed “there is
nothing unique about the United States” and “issued apologies for
America” abroad—and short on policy proposals. The few substantive ideas
were costly and bellicose: increasing the number of warships the Navy
builds per year from nine to fifteen (five more than the service
requested in its 2012 budget), boosting the size of the military by
100,000 troops, placing a missile defense system in Europe and
stationing two aircraft carriers near Iran. “What he articulated in the
Citadel speech was one of the most inchoate, disorganized, cliché-filled
foreign policy speeches that any serious candidate has ever given,”
says Steve Clemons, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation.
Romney’s team is notable for including Bush aides tarnished by the
Iraq fiasco: Robert Joseph, the National Security Council official who
inserted the infamous “sixteen words” in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union
message claiming that Iraq had tried to buy enriched uranium from Niger;
Dan Senor, former spokesman for the hapless Coalition Provisional
Authority under Paul Bremer in Iraq; and Eric Edelman, a top official at
the Pentagon under Bush. “I can’t name a single Romney foreign policy
adviser who believes the Iraq War was a mistake,” says Cato’s Preble.
“Two-thirds of the American people do believe the Iraq War was a
mistake. So he has willingly chosen to align himself with that one-third
of the population right out of the gate.”
Shortly after McCain’s 2008 defeat, Kagan, Edelman, Senor and
Weekly Standard
editor Bill Kristol launched the Foreign Policy Initiative, a neocon
successor to PNAC. FPI’s mission has been to keep the Bush doctrine
alive in the Obama era—supporting a troop increase in Afghanistan and
opposing a 2014 withdrawal; advocating a 20,000-troop residual force in
Iraq; backing a military strike and/or regime change in Iran; promoting
military intervention in Syria; urging a more confrontational posture
toward Russia; and opposing cuts in military spending. Three of FPI’s
four board members are advising Romney.
Edelman, having worked for Dick Cheney in both Bush administrations,
is Romney’s link to Cheneyworld. (Edelman suggested to Cheney’s chief of
staff, Scooter Libby, the idea of leaking the identity of CIA agent
Valerie Plame to undermine former ambassador Joe Wilson for his
New York Times
op-ed detailing the Bush administration’s falsified Iraq-Niger
connection.) As ambassador to Turkey in 2003, Edelman failed to persuade
Ankara to support the Iraq War. Turkish columnist Ibrahim Karagul
called him “probably the least-liked and trusted American ambassador in
Turkish history.” Edelman later moved to the Defense Department, where
in 2007 he became infamous for scolding Hillary Clinton when she asked
how the Pentagon was planning its withdrawal from Iraq. He’s one of
nearly a dozen of Romney advisers who have urged that the United States
consider an attack Iran.
Senor is best known for his disastrous stint in Iraq under Bremer,
when the United States disbanded the Iraqi Army and tried to privatize
the economy. In his book on Iraq, Rajiv Chandrasekaran of the
Washington Post
wrote of Senor, “His efforts to spin failures into successes sometimes
reached the point of absurdity.” Senor is particularly close to the
Israeli right, co-writing the 2009 book
Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle,
which reads like an extended investment brochure. He now serves as a
conduit between Romney and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “Mitt-Bibi
will be the new Reagan-Thatcher,” Senor tweeted after the
New York Times ran a story about the close friendship of the two men, which dates to the late 1970s.
A mixture of domestic politics (trying to make Obama appear weak and
courting conservative elements of the Jewish vote) and neocon ideology
has led Romney to call for everything short of war on Iran. “Either the
ayatollahs will get the message, or they will learn some very painful
lessons about the meaning of American resolve,” he wrote in a March 5
Washington Post op-ed.
Romney has been similarly hawkish on military spending, another
neocon priority. His plan to spend a minimum of 4 percent of GDP on the
Pentagon would increase its budget by more than $200 billion in 2016, a
38 percent hike over Obama’s budget, according to the Center on Budget
and Policy Priorities. “Romney’s proposal to embark on a second straight
decade of escalating military spending would be the first time in
American history that war preparation and defense spending had increased
as a share of overall economic activity for such an extended period,”
wrote Merrill Goozner in the
Fiscal Times. “When coupled with
the 20 percent cut in taxes he promises, it would require shrinking
domestic spending to levels not seen since the Great Depression—before
programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid began.” Such cuts,
Goozner noted, “would likely throw the U.S. economy back into
recession.”
Since the 2010 election, military spending has been a topic of great
debate on the right. Fiscal conservatives like Grover Norquist’s
Americans for Tax Reform and the Cato Institute have urged Congress to
consider serious Pentagon cuts. “Department of Defense spending, in
particular, has been provided protected status that has isolated it from
serious scrutiny and allowed the Pentagon to waste billions in taxpayer
money,” twenty-three conservative leaders, led by Norquist, wrote to
Congressional Republicans in November 2010. “Simply advocating more
ships, more troops and more weapons isn’t a viable path forward,”
Huntsman echoed during the primary campaign. That view met a furious
pushback from the Defending Defense coalition, a joint project of FPI,
the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Heritage Foundation,
which mirrored Romney’s plan to increase military spending drastically.
“When the Soviet Union disappeared, a lot of people on the right failed
to notice,” Norquist said on Capitol Hill last year [see Robert
Dreyfuss, “GOP Fires at the Pentagon,” February 14, 2011].
Romney hasn’t said what he’d do with a bigger military or how he’d
pay for it. But it’s safe to assume the money will go toward preserving
or enlarging the national security state. Romney’s counterterrorism
adviser since 2007 has been former CIA operative Cofer Black, another
controversial figure from the Bush era. The
Daily Beast calls
Black “Romney’s trusted envoy to the dark side” and “the campaign’s
in-house intelligence officer.” In 2007 Romney sourced Black in refusing
to classify waterboarding as torture (and also said he wanted to
“double Guantánamo”). As head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center
following 9/11, Black supervised the agency’s “extraordinary rendition”
program, which illegally transported alleged terrorists to secret
detention centers abroad, where they were tortured. “After 9/11 the
gloves come off,” Black infamously testified before Congress. He joined
the private security firm Blackwater in 2005, specializing in
intelligence gathering for governments and business. More recently, the
Daily Beast
reported, Romney has relied on Black for security assessments of
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt and Iran, including Iran’s nuclear program.
The hardliners on Romney’s team have sidelined moderates like
Mitchell Reiss, the candidate’s principal foreign policy adviser in 2008
and former director of policy planning at the State Department under
Colin Powell. In December Romney disavowed Reiss’s call to negotiate
with the Taliban, pledging to defeat the insurgency militarily (which
few foreign policy experts believe is realistic) and criticizing the
Obama administration’s plan to begin withdrawing troops next year.
Romney also sided with the likes of Senor over Reiss by backing the Bush
surge in Iraq and Obama’s escalation in Afghanistan. This
black-and-white worldview is dangerously myopic, obsessed with military
power and evil foes while ignoring complex challenges like Europe’s
economic crisis and the Arab Spring. Romney and his chief advisers “see
the world through a cold war prism that is totally out of touch with the
realities of the twenty-first century,” Vice President Joe Biden said
recently in a major foreign policy speech.
Romney’s case for election rests on his credentials as a competent
businessman who can restructure the economy and government. Yet his
choice of foreign policy advisers undercuts that sales pitch by
elevating radical ideologues who want to spend profligately on
unnecessary weapons and wars. If Romney wants to run a fiscally prudent
and well-managed country, his GOP model should be Eisenhower, not Bush.
But someone like Ike would never make it through a Republican primary
today.
* * *
This year’s GOP primary was supposed to showcase a long-simmering
party debate on foreign policy. “The hawkish consensus on national
security that has dominated Republican foreign policy for the last
decade is giving way to a more nuanced view,” the
Times
reported last June. What was left of the moderate wing of the party was
particularly excited about the campaign of Huntsman, Obama’s former
ambassador to China, who opposed the war in Afghanistan and advocated “a
more judicious approach toward foreign entanglements.”
Huntsman
advisers included realist Republicans like former George H.W. Bush
national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, former Deputy Secretary of
State Richard Armitage and Council on Foreign Relations chair Richard
Haass.
Yet Huntsman withered under blistering attacks from the neocons and
other GOP standard-bearers, including Senators John McCain and Lindsay
Graham. “I don’t think you saw a whole lot of appetite in the party for
his views on foreign policy,” said Jamie Fly, executive director of the
Foreign Policy Initiative. And Ron Paul’s isolationist views didn’t help
him in the primaries, either. Indeed, Romney veered right in response
to Bachmann, Cain, Gingrich, Perry and Santorum rather than left to
appeal to Huntsman or Paul voters.
After the twin disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan, you’d think
Republicans would be more skeptical of interventionism and the neocons
more humbled. Yet the party’s major neoconservative institutions, like
FPI, AEI and Heritage, have pushed aggressively for US intervention in
Libya, Iran and Syria. “How do you get out of this state of interminable
war?” asks Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Powell. “My
party has not a clue. In fact, they want to deepen it, widen it and go
further, on Chinese and Japanese dollars.” Wilkerson says he was
“astonished by how much the neocons seem to still have influence,” and
that he was “scared to death” about the prospect that people like McCain
and Graham would have sway over foreign policy. I asked Cato’s Preble
why the neocons haven’t lost more clout in GOP circles after the
failures of the Bush years. ”They’ve crafted this narrative around the
surge, claiming Iraq was, in fact, a success,” Preble says. “They’ve
ridden that ever since.”
Today there’s a striking disconnect between the neocon establishment
in Washington and the beliefs of GOP voters. Fifty-two percent of
Republicans believe the war in Afghanistan is not worth fighting, an
all-time high. Seventy-one percent of self-identified conservative
voters are worried about the war’s costs, and 57 percent agree that “the
United States can dramatically lower the number of troops in
Afghanistan without putting America at risk.”
“Where is this grassroots
movement for open-ended US interventionism abroad?” asks Preble. “It
doesn’t exist. In fact, public sentiment is in the opposite direction.”
Yet only two GOP senators, Mike Lee and Rand Paul, voted in March to
support an expedited timeline for withdrawal from Afghanistan. The likes
of McCain and Graham, who advocate a longer US commitment there and
elsewhere, continue to speak for the party establishment. (Another top
Romney foreign policy adviser, Richard Williamson, who served as Bush’s
special envoy to Sudan, advised the McCain campaign in 2008.)
With the party base focused on other issues—only 1 percent of Republicans named Afghanistan as their top issue in the latest
Washington Post/ABC
News poll—the neocons have filled the vacuum. “There are more
neoconservative think tanks than there are neoconservatives,” jokes
Preble, whose boss at Cato, Ed Crane, calls them “a head without a
body.” They have clearly overwhelmed the libertarians and realists. “The
neoconservatives, I’ll concede, have a very good ground game,” says
Preble. “They have a network of institutions in Washington that are very
effective and vocal. They have a friendly audience in many of the
editorial pages of the major newspapers and magazines. That gives them a
significant leg up in terms of making these arguments.”
Elder statesmen from the George H.W. Bush administration like Powell
and Scowcroft are much closer to Obama than to Romney. “The foreign
policy experts who represent old-school, small-c conservatism and
internationalism have been pushed out of the party,” says Heather
Hurlburt, executive director of the center-left National Security
Network. “Who in the Republican Party still listens to Brent Scowcroft?”
Wilkerson says the likes of Powell and Scowcroft are “very worried
about their ability to restore moderation and sobriety to the party’s
foreign and domestic policies.” In 2012 Obama is running as Bush 41 and
Romney as Bush 43.
Romney would like to make the 2012 election a replay of 1980, when
Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter. Romney has attacked Obama’s
“breathtaking weakness” and called him “America’s most feckless
president since Carter.” Yet so far, Romney hasn’t been able to make
this argument stick. Obama has been more hawkish than many liberals and
conservatives would like to admit, and his main foreign policy
triumph—the killing of Osama bin Laden—is easy to communicate. As a
result, Obama has a seventeen-point advantage over Romney on foreign
affairs and a seven-point advantage on terrorism. The public is also
more supportive of Obama’s overall foreign policy worldview. A Pew poll
last year found that Americans prefer peace through diplomacy over peace
through military strength by 58 percent to 31 percent. A similar
percentage believes the United States should compromise in order to work
with allies rather than go it alone.
Some top Republicans are worried about Romney’s belligerent
statements. “In foreign affairs the Republican candidates staked out
dangerous ground,” conservative columnist Peggy Noonan wrote in the
Wall Street Journal
after the primaries unofficially ended. “They are allowing the GOP to
be painted as the war party. They are ceding all non-war ground to the
president, who can come forward as the sober, constrained, non-bellicose
contender. Do they want that? Are they under the impression America is
hungry for another war? Really? After the past 11 years?” Recent surveys
of swing voters in Ohio and Florida by Third Way and Greenberg Quinlan
Rosner confirm her fears. “Republicans strike many of these swing voters
as too extreme; too aggressive; too quick to take dangerous actions
without all the facts; and ‘too quick on the trigger,’” they reported.
Romney has already committed a string of foreign policy gaffes on the
campaign trail. He was chided by House Speaker John Boehner for
criticizing Obama while the president was abroad and widely panned for
calling Russia “our No. 1 geopolitical foe” and demanding that Obama
release the transcripts of his conversations with foreign leaders. Peter
Feaver, an adviser to Bush at the National Security Council, urged
Romney to “walk back from reckless campaign promises.”
Yet Romney inexplicably continues to get the benefit of the doubt from leading pundits. A
Times news article recently praised his “impressive bench of foreign policy advisers,” and
Times
columnist Nicholas Kristof called them “credible, respected figures.”
Aaron David Miller of the Woodrow Wilson Center similarly discounted
Romney’s hawkish positions. “He’s articulating policies he wouldn’t
follow,” Miller said. “Barring an extraordinary event like September 11,
Romney will be much more moderate, much less reckless than George W.
Bush.”
How can we be so sure? After the Bush administration, it’s best not
to take anything for granted. Yes, Romney might not yet be a reliable
neoconservative. The neocons, after all, have firm beliefs about the
necessity of military interventionism, which they’re willing to defend
even when unpopular. Romney, on the other hand, simply opposes whatever
policy Obama pursues. Neoconservatism, for him, is an ideology of
convenience. “I don’t think he has any North Star on foreign policy
right now, other than whatever Obama is for, he’s on the other side of
it,” says Clemons.
That said, Romney’s malleability is an advantage for his neocon
advisers, giving them an opportunity to shape his worldview, as they did
with Bush after 9/11. Four years after Bush left office in disgrace,
Romney is their best shot to get back in power. If that happens, they’re
likely to pursue the same aggressive policies they advocated under
Bush. “I don’t think there’s been a deep rethink,” says Clemons. “I
don’t think the neoconservatives feel chastened at all. As a movement,
the true neoconservatives never, ever give up. They will be back.”
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