Romney Strives to Stand Apart in Global Policy: MittRomney has yet to explain how he would conduct policy towar...
nytimes.com/2012/10/08/us/politics/romney-remains-vague-on-foreign-policy-details.html
joshtpm Josh Marshall
Romney foreign policy advisers are "uncertain" about his views "and are uncertain themselves about how he would govern" http://t.co/XfVH9rMF
Romney Strives to Stand Apart in Global Policy
Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
Mitt Romney at the Western Wall in July. He says President Obama has failed to project American strength abroad.
By DAVID E. SANGER
Published: October 8, 2012
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WASHINGTON — Mitt Romney is intensifying his efforts to draw a sharp contrast with President Obama on national security in the presidential campaign’s closing stages, portraying Mr. Obama as having mishandled the tumult in the Arab world and having left the nation exposed to a terrorist attack in Libya.
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Cliff Owen/Associated Press
Liz Cheney, who worked at the State Department under George W. Bush, has joined campaign conference calls.
In a speech on Monday at the Virginia Military Institute, Mr. Romney will declare that “hope is not a strategy” for dealing with the rise of Islamist governments in the Middle East or an Iran racing toward the capability to build a nuclear weapon, according to excerpts released by his campaign.
The essence of Mr. Romney’s argument is that he would take the United States back to an earlier era, one that would result, as his young foreign policy director, Alex Wong, told reporters on Sunday, in “the restoration of a strategy that served us well for 70 years.”
But beyond his critique of Mr. Obama as failing to project American strength abroad, Mr. Romney has yet to fill in many of the details of how he would conduct policy toward the rest of the world, or to resolve deep ideological rifts within the Republican Party and his own foreign policy team. It is a disparate and politely fractious team of advisers that includes warring tribes of neoconservatives, traditional strong-defense conservatives and a band of self-described “realists” who believe there are limits to the degree the United States can impose its will.
Each group is vying to shape Mr. Romney’s views, usually through policy papers that many of the advisers wonder if he is reading. Indeed, in a campaign that has been so intensely focused on economic issues, some of these advisers, in interviews over the past two weeks in which most insisted on anonymity, say they have engaged with him so little on issues of national security that they are uncertain what camp he would fall into, and are uncertain themselves about how he would govern.
“Would he take the lead in bombing Iran if the mullahs were getting too close to a bomb, or just back up the Israelis?” one of his senior advisers asked last week. “Would he push for peace with thePalestinians, or just live with the status quo? He’s left himself a lot of wiggle room.”
