Romney's Foreign Policy

Obama's success in killing Osama Bin Laden, pursuing the war against Al Qaeda and ending the war in Iraq while preparing for an exit from Afghanistan has left the Republicans with few opportunities to criticize him on foreign policy grounds. This combined with unemployment stuck at over eight percent and record high deficits has meant that Romney has kept his campaign focused on economics. But because it is their job, foreign policy and security/defense writers have written articles speculating about Romney's likely foreign policy if he were to be elected. Several have been featured at RealClearWorld, because this is their job.

Take for instance this article from Foreign Policy by Jacob Heilbron. Sunday there was an article from Joe Klein of Time speculating on Romney's real foreign policy tendencies. And before that from a month ago an article from the American Interest by Walter Russell Mead on Romney's foreign policy address.There was also an earlier Mead (?) article on American foreign policy since World War I that unfortunately I can't find. But don't expect to find any foreign policy talk at the GOP Convention this week--that might scare off the voters or worse, send them to Obama.

Were Romney's remarks in Israel a gaffe? And were they true?

Romney's trip abroad has gotten much more coverage than he and his top planners probably thought it would. But working off of the old adage that no publicity is bad publicity (which is definitely not true for presidential candidates, at least those who are nominees of major parties), possibly it was intended this way. While Romney's remarks about the Olympics in London were possibly clumsy, they are unlikely to lose him votes in America. The same can be said of his remarks in Israel that culture was responsible for the difference between the Israeli GDP and the Palestinian GDP. But is the last remark true?

The CNN National Security Debate

I just finished watching the CNN-Heritage Foundation National Security Debate, the second foreign policy debate so far in this election cycle. I was most interested in seeing how the front runners performed: Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. I thought that Romney outperformed his chief rival. Romney was cautious and played not to make any major errors as well as getting in subtle digs at his opponents. Newt was busy showing off and showing how smart he was--which left him open for attack from Michelle Bachmann and others for supporting amnesty for illegal immigrants. Romney said he was opposed to creating magnets for illegal immigration and he specifically mentioned in-state tuition rates for illegals. This was a subtle dig at Rick Perry.

Bachmann and Rick Santorum again had their moments as in the first foreign policy debate in SC about ten days ago. But neither has much chance of winning the nomination if polls are anything to go by. Huntsman also sounded intelligent, but he also is not going anywhere. Herman Cain sounded as ignorant as ever. In fact he sounds like a black male version of Sarah Palin--winging it and hoping to cover up his ignorance by his fervor.

The CBS-National Journal Foreign Policy Debate

Just some random thoughts from watching the Republican foreign policy debate:


1) The most intelligent remarks are coming from the bottom-tier candidates such as Jon Huntsman, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul,  and occasionally Michelle Bachmann.

2) The top level candidates seem to be posturing to the crowd, especially Mitt Romney and Herman Cain.

3) Herman Cain denied that waterboarding is not torture but merely an enhanced interrogation technique. What are the odds that within 48 hours he will be claiming that he was just kidding or that he was misunderstood?

American Jews and the 2012 Election

Next to blacks, Jews have been the most consistently loyal ethnic constituency of the Democratic Party. And considering that until 1965 blacks could not vote in the South, and that many in the North do not vote, Jews have been a more electorally important one. Jews are concentrated demographically in the states with the largest electoral votes: New York, Illinois, California, Florida, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Texas (in roughly that order). Jews are only between two and two and a half percent of the American population, but because they vote in much higher numbers they are about three or four percent of the electorate on election day.  Jews have voted consistently Democratic since the Progressive Era when they voted for Woodrow Wilson.

The Republicans and Foreign Policy

About a month or two ago--I never saved the article--Real Clear World ran an article on the foreign policy experts advising the candidates. The only one to have many names I recognized was then frontrunner and establishment favorite Mitt Romney. He had three names I recognized: Richard Haass, Stephen Hadley, and Mitchell Reiss. Richard Haass was/is an expert on regional conflicts especially the Arab-Israeli conflict and Northern Ireland. He served as a Middle East specialist on the National Security Council in the George H W Bush administration. For Dubya he served as the first American envoy to Northern Ireland, where he played a major role in convincing Gerry Adams that the IRA was actually disarm. Upon leaving there he took up a position with the Council on Foreign Relations that puts out the establishment Foreign Affairs magazine. Stephen Hadley served as Condi Rice's assistant at the National Security Council and then took over during Dubya's second term as National Security Advisor to George Bush. Mitchell Reiss was an expert on nuclear proliferation and a country expert on North Korea. When Haass left Belfast for New York, Reiss became his successor as American envoy. Reiss recently wrote a book exploring the question of when terrorist movements should be co-opted by negotiation and power sharing and when they should be shunned.

Perry relies on figures that he met while serving as governor of Texas. I did not recognize any names. The other candidate who had some recognizable names is Ron Paul. Paul has Leon Hadar, a former journalist working for the Jerusalem Post and the author of two books on American policy in the region, Sandstorm and Quagmire. He advocates an American military and political disengagement from the region. The opinion would be considered mainstream in the Democratic Party but is unsaleable to the Republicans. Because Paul is a libertarian running in a conservative party--a square peg in a round hole--he has no chance of being nominated.

Jon Huntsman, the former governor of Utah and American ambassador to China, basically serves as his own foreign policy advisor. He was a Mormon missionary in Taiwan as a young man, speaks fluent Mandarin Chinese, and is quite knowledgeable about trade matters and economic policy. But he registers at about two percent in the polls and is betting his whole future on New Hampshire, where he will have to compete with Romney, the other Mormon.

So far foreign policy, as distinct from immigration, has hardly registered in the Republican debates. The party is agitated by economic and social policies: abortion, immigration, health care, tax levels and debt. By slowly withdrawing from Iraq and continuing to oversee the assassination of leading Al Qaeda figures around the Middle East, Obama has effectively removed terrorism as a major political issue. Democrats still debate the American presence in Afghanistan; Republicans do not. It is almost a repeat of Vietnam forty years ago, but with the roles of the two parties reversed. The Democrats got us involved in Vietnam and then Nixon oversaw the withdrawal and the GOP spent twenty years talking about the Democrats as the party that was unreliable on national security. Maybe the Democrats can do the same about the Republicans for the next twenty years.

Should Perry or someone else other than Romney end up as the nominee, he (or she) can inherit the establishment foreign policy advisors by default. After all, Kissinger was never a Nixon advisor in the 1960s. He was a Nelson Rockefeller advisor whom Nixon inherited after he won the election in 1968. Obama inherited Clinton's stable of foreign policy advisors once he named her as his secretary of state. But he could have done so even without naming her--anyone who wanted to serve in government in a senior position had nowhere else to go in the short term. 

In American politics the conservatives determine who the Republican nominee is; the progressives determine who the Democratic nominee is. It is then up to the independents, who rarely vote based on foreign affairs, to determine which party's foreign policy establishment serves in office.

As a postscript let me add that on Friday Oct. 7, 2011 Romney gave his first foreign policy address of the race. Here is a link to a commentary on it. (See the article by  James Joyner in the Atlantic on the Sat. Oct. 8 panel.)                        )