Given the ambivalence among his own team about the approach to Iran\u2019s 2009 protest movement, Obama may be tempted to duck any challenge from Romney on this issue. He should not \u2013 rather, the President should use any Romney moralizing to challenge the governor for specific policy proposals that would advance a democratic future in Iran. It would be a welcome relief to hear both candidates offer serious ideas rather than more empty slogans on Iran.<\/p>\n
<\/a>Romney Asked the Right Questions About U.S. Policy in the Middle East With his Middle East speech<\/a> on Monday, Mitt Romney \u2013 after much fumbling \u2013 seems to have finally found a distinct and somewhat coherent foreign policy message. Many of Romney\u2019s critics quickly dismissed the speech. \u201cThere\u2019s absolutely nothing in this speech,\u201d said<\/a> James Lindsay of the Council on Foreign Relations, while former secretary of state Madeleine Albright called Romney \u201cvery shallow.\u201d Romney may not have provided the right answers, but he asked many of the right questions. In his remarks, a common narrative emerged \u2013 that the Obama administration, in its desire to reduce its footprint in the Middle East, has abdicated America\u2019s leadership role in the region. Oddly enough, this perception is not a Republican fiction but is increasingly widespread within the Middle East itself. Obama, the argument goes, is a weak president who can be pushed around, with little consequence.<\/p>\n To what extent, though, is perceived American \u201cdecline\u201d a function of specific policies choices or is it a more general issue of the projection of U.S. power, and how that power is perceived by our friends and enemies in the region? Romney seems to be arguing that the latter, however hard to measure, counts for a lot. Indeed, the debate over \u201cleading\u201d versus \u201cleading from behind,\u201d as tired as it might sound, reflects real differences in philosophy between the candidates.<\/p>\n In Syria, such differences have obvious and practical implications on the ground. Romney argued, with good reason, that \u201cthe President has failed to lead in Syria.\u201d He pledged to prioritize the coordination and arming of rebel forces (although he did not specify how directly the U.S. would be involved). In contrast, the Obama administration has actively discouraged Saudi Arabia and Qatar from arming the rebels, as Robert Worth recently reported<\/a> in the New York Times<\/i>. Khalid al-Attiyah, Qatar\u2019s state minister for foreign affairs, stressed the importance of getting more advanced weapons to the opposition. \u201cBut first we need the backing of the United States,\u201d he said, in a rare, public criticism of the Obama administration. In Turkey, the feeling is closer to one of betrayal, as Turkish officials find themselves alone, on the brink of war with their Syrian neighbors, and an international community that seems uninterested in doing much about it. That is to say nothing of Syrian rebels themselves who have been calling for either arms or outright military intervention since last year. A year is a long time to wait, and they may be turning against the United States. As a member of Kafr Takharim\u2019s revolutionary council said<\/a>: \u201cWe read in the media that we are receiving things. But we haven\u2019t seen it. We only received speeches from the West.\u201d When Romney quoted a Syrian woman saying \u201cwe will not forget that that you forgot about us,\u201d he was conveying a real, palpable sense that, in the eyes of a growing number of Arabs and Turks, the United States and Europe have abandoned the Syrian people. The memory of that betrayal, if it continues, is likely to have real consequences for the United States and its allies.<\/p>\n A second notable contrast was on aid conditionality. Romney said he would \u201cmake further reforms to our foreign assistance to create incentives for good governance, free enterprise, and greater trade, in the Middle East.\u201d Regarding Egypt in particular, he spoke of including \u201cclear conditions on our aid.\u201d Nearly two years into the Arab uprisings, the Obama administration has failed to tie any existing or new aid to explicit benchmarks on political reform and democratization. U.S. military aid to Egypt continued to flow despite egregious anti-democratic behavior on the part of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, including waging war on civil society, dissolving a democratically elected parliament, reinstating martial law, and unilaterally stripping the presidency of many of its powers. Meanwhile, the political situation in Jordan<\/a> \u2013 the second-largest per capita recipient of U.S. aid \u2013 continues to deteriorate. But a discussion of reformulating U.S. assistance there has not even begun.<\/p>\n What would Romney actually do about Jordan, though? Here, the tensions in Romney\u2019s foreign policy approach become all too obvious. In his speech, Romney spoke of standing by our \u201cfriends,\u201d but what about our friends \u2013 the leaders of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait \u2013 who have actually become more repressive in the wake of the same Arab Spring that Romney claims to support? Instead of urging Gulf countries to take reform seriously, Romney pledged to \u201cdeepen our cooperation with our partners in the Gulf.\u201d<\/p>\n It is also remarkable that Romney managed to run through an entire speech on the Middle East without mentioning the word \u201cIslamist\u201d even once. Neoconservatives within the Republican Party prioritize democracy promotion but, like the Tea Party faction of the party, they also fear the effect Islamists will have on U.S. interests, including Israel\u2019s security (I discuss intra-Republican differences in this recent Brookings paper<\/a>). The problem is that democratic openings inevitably benefit Islamist parties. Again, the tensions here seem irreconcilable, which is probably why Romney avoided addressing them.<\/p>\n It was President George W. Bush who once said that \u201cAmerica\u2019s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one.\u201d Unfortunately, they are not, and won\u2019t be anytime soon. Sometimes, difficult choices have to be made, but Romney does not appear willing to make them. But, then again, neither does Obama. The Arab revolts have, in some ways, closed the gap between interests and ideals (as in Libya and Syria), yet, at the same time, they have made the policy contradictions all the more obvious (as in Bahrain). Whatever else might be said about it, Romney\u2019s speech did us the service of highlighting those contradictions. Instead of doubling down on President Obama\u2019s flawed Middle East record, Obama\u2019s supporters (and, if he wins, Obama himself) should engage with the substance of Republican critiques and outline a vision for re-thinking and re-orienting U.S. policy in the region. Otherwise, the contradictions \u2013 which have damaged U.S. credibility in the region for decades \u2013 will persist. And so too will the consequences.<\/p>\n <\/a>Romney Offers Clear Choices. But Are They Sustainable? Contrary to the strategy he followed in the first presidential debate<\/a> last Thursday, Mitt Romney did not try to strike a more moderate tone in his foreign policy speech on Monday. Instead, he maintained a hawkish, neoconservative line. He thus confirmed the two campaign choices he made in the summer of 2011 \u2013 but opened himself to questions about the economics of his assertiveness.<\/p>\n The first choice is to ignore the growing number of Republicans and Independents who are tired of foreign interventions (see here<\/a> and here<\/a>) and are not convinced that defense spending should be increased. This was not always the case. In June 2011 for example, Romney said<\/a> it was time to \u201cbring our troops home\u201d from Afghanistan \u201cas soon as we possibly can.\u201d This rhetoric was replaced by a much more hawkish stance, especially in his speech at The Citadel a year ago, where he started talking about \u201ca new American century<\/a>,\u201d insisting soon afterwards that it was \u201cnot time for America to cut and run<\/a>\u201d from Afghanistan.<\/p>\n In his speech of Monday, Romney acknowledged the existence of this anti-interventionist strain (\u201cI know many Americans are asking whether our country today\u2014with our ailing economy, and our massive debt, and after 11 years at war\u2014is still capable of leading\u201d), but only to unambiguously reassert his preference for an internationalist and hawkish posture. In purely electoral terms, it means that he expects more votes from his attacks on President Obama\u2019s perceived weakness and lack of leadership than he fears losing them from anti-interventionist Republicans and Independents, or from his association with the neoconservatives.<\/p>\n That is the second choice Mitt Romney made in the summer of 2011. He adopted a foreign policy line which checks all the boxes of neoconservatism<\/a>, the school of thought associated with the administration of George W. Bush and the 2003 Iraq war. That foreign policy tradition, which dates back to the 1970s, is based on\u00a0five pillars<\/a> (internationalism, primacy, unilateralism, militarism and democracy), which were all present in one form or another in Romney\u2019s speech on Monday, most notably in sentences like \u201cif America does not lead, others will\u2014others who do not share our interests and our values\u2014and the world will grow darker\u201d or \u201cour friends and allies across the globe do not want less American leadership. They want more.\u201d<\/p>\n Romney\u2019s positioning is thus very clear, but he opens himself to criticism on various counts. First, given Obama\u2019s image on national security, which is unusually strong for a Democratic candidate thanks to the Bin Laden raid and his decisive use of drones, it might not be the best electoral strategy to use the traditional line of attack of Democrats as weak and insufficiently patriotic. Second, it is hard for Romney to present himself as more assertive than Obama without crossing the fine line between hawkishness and adventurism. Whether on Syria, Iran, Afghanistan or China, Romney outlines policies that are actually not very different from the President\u2019s; you have to believe the rhetoric in order to detect the existence of a real gap.<\/p>\n Lastly, there might be cause for skepticism about the fiscal and diplomatic sustainability of his foreign policy. Even without buying into the current wave of declinism<\/a>, it is hard to deny that America\u2019s power relative to that of other countries has indeed decreased, and a posture of uncompromising hawkishness (Iran), toughness (Russia, China), or conditionality (Egypt; foreign aid) vis-\u00e0-vis the rest of the world \u2013what James Traub dubbed the \u201cmore enemies, fewer friends doctrine<\/a>\u201d \u2013 might not be the most effective way to fulfill America\u2019s objectives. This is all the more true that America\u2019s resources will necessarily be strained in the next four years, and that the issue of the debt will loom large.<\/p>\n This leads to the most serious questions about Romney\u2019s speech. Although he has found it difficult<\/a>, because the Middle East has a way to always force itself back to the agenda, President Obama has tried to redistribute American diplomatic and military assets away from that region and towards emerging powers, especially in the Asia-Pacific, where the stakes are highest in the long term. More generally, he has tried to rebalance U.S. foreign policy towards global and economic issues and away from land wars and counter-terrorism. In his speech of Monday, the Romney outlined a world which closely resembled the one George W. Bush inhabited, as if frozen in time circa 2005. He didn\u2019t really talk about China and the Asia-Pacific region, and mentioned economics only when talking about free trade. One only needs to read Robert Zoellick\u2019s excellent analysis \u201cThe Currency of Power<\/a>\u201d to be convinced of the imperious necessity to integrate economics into any foreign policy strategy. Such integration was thoroughly lacking in Romney\u2019s speech. But since he picked Zoellick to head his national security transition team, perhaps that dimension will eventually be added, if he reaches the White House?<\/p>\n <\/a>Governor Romney\u2019s Approach to the Middle East Governor Romney\u2019s foreign policy speech at VMI is a timely and constructive contribution to the presidential campaign. He has delivered a thoughtful critique of the Obama record in the Middle East and provided some specific policy proposals. Importantly, Gov. Romney stated his commitment to a two state solution of the Israel-Palestine conflict, an issue his previous statements had left confused at best. Romney gave no road map for how to secure a peace agreement but he acknowledged the need to do so.<\/p>\n Romney also rightly assessed the threat still posed by al Qaeda. It has been bloodied in Pakistan by the 300 drone strikes since Obama\u2019s inauguration and the death of Osama bin Laden but it is not defeated. The chaos across the Arab world has opened the door for al Qaeda\u2019s comeback from Yemen to Mali. It is indeed clear now it had a role in the Benghazi attack on the 11th anniversary of 911. Aside from calls to leadership, however, we don\u2019t have much answer to how a Romney administration will fight al Qaeda differently. Standing by Israel, stopping Iran\u2019s nuclear ambitions and keeping close ties to Saudi Arabia may be good policies in their own right but don\u2019t really address the al Qaeda challenge. Drones indeed are not a strategy, as the VMI speech notes, but what is the strategy to fight al Qaeda?<\/p>\n The governor was helpfully a little more clear on Afghanistan but here he also left room for more to come. He appears to accept the 2014 date for transition to Afghan leadership but seems to open the door to a reappraisal if battlefield conditions warrant. That is smart, we need flexibility. Does he mean he will keep more troops longer if his generals say they are needed? The even harder problem is how to deal with Pakistan which backs the Taliban and harbors its leaders but which has gotten $25 billion in aid from two administrations since 911, one Republican and one Democrat. How can we defeat the Taliban if Pakistan insists on backing them? Is Romney still opposed to talks with the Taliban as he stated last spring?<\/p>\n The VMI speech is a good start to what needs to be a far more vigorous and detailed debate in the next month. Both candidates need to be much sharper on the challenges ahead. The war in Afghanistan is eleven years old today but a successful outcome is still elusive. The Arab awakening is changing the politics of an entire region more decisively than any event in its recent history. The debate is critical. The time for vague soundbites is over.<\/p>\n <\/a>A Good Speech for America, Regardless Who Wins While I did not agree with everything Governor Romney said in his foreign policy speech at VMI today, and while I have particular differences of opinion with the Governor over the necessity of his proposed defense spending levels, he delivered a good speech on balance. However, the Governor\u2019s critiques of President Obama\u2019s handling of the attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya and the Iranian elections of 2009, as well as the Administration\u2019s \u201cpivot\u201d towards Asia in recent years, were not compelling. Romney\u2019s promise not to show flexibility towards Russia on missile defense was too categorical as well, but one must expect differences of opinion during a presidential campaign.<\/p>\n That said, the speech was still effective in many ways, because Romney conveyed a sense of sustained American engagement with the world that is welcome at a time when our domestic economic situation could easily produce a \u201cCome home, America\u201d mentality among the voting public. Instead, Romney talked about being patient in Afghanistan, and doing more to help the Libyan revolution in language that echoed that of nation-building advocates of the past. Romney also spoke of helping the Syrian opposition a bit more \u2013 without dragging the United States into war \u2013 and consolidating aid programs under a single leader in the U.S. government, which would make these programs more effective and would support certain Middle East countries in their efforts to make their revolutions succeed on terms that overlap with American interests.<\/p>\n These ideas generally make sense to me individually, and taken together they suggest ongoing American leadership in the world, regardless of who wins the election. I don\u2019t know which party the speech will help most on November 6, but on balance I think it is a speech\u2014and a type of foreign policy debate\u2014that is good for the country either way.<\/p>\n <\/a>What Romney Would Mean for Europe As the U.S. elections approach, Mitt Romney\u2019s sometimes bellicose rhetoric on national security is raising European eyebrows. But many in Washington believe that if the Republican contender were to become president, U.S. policies might not differ much from the last four years. Despite Romney\u2019s strong criticism of Barack Obama, some of the challenger\u2019s views on foreign policy issues are similar to the president\u2019s. And the points on which they disagree may matter little: U.S. presidents rarely implement their more outlandish campaign pledges. In any case, Congress will continue to set limits on U.S. policy on issues such as the Arab-Israeli conflict and nuclear arms control, whoever the president. But, if Mitt Romney genuinely believes much of his foreign policy rhetoric, a Republican victory in November could mean difficult times for transatlantic relations.<\/p>\n The former governor has, for example, identified Russia as America\u2019s \u201cnumber one geopolitical foe.\u201d He considers Obama\u2019s \u2018reset\u2019 with Moscow to have been a failure. He opposed ratification of the New START treaty on strategic weapons reductions because it supposedly allows Russia to expand its nuclear arsenal \u2013 Romney has notably warned that the treaty, unprecedentedly, allows Russia to mount intercontinental ballistic missiles on bombers. The Republican candidate has also strongly criticised Obama\u2019s missile defence plan as less technologically reliable and ambitious than that of George W. Bush, and for downgrading the involvement of U.S. allies Poland and the Czech Republic.<\/p>\n Europeans, however, welcomed the U.S.-Russia reset. Many of them worry about Vladimir Putin\u2019s authoritarianism and non-co-operation on Syria. But most Europeans think the reset has made Russia more helpful on Afghanistan and Iran. They like New START, and many EU governments will have been confused by Romney\u2019s concerns about bombers equipped with intercontinental ballistic missiles. Indeed it would be impossible for a bomber to take off with such a heavy load. Even EU countries that are more hawkish on Russia are likely to see Romney\u2019s views as unnecessarily antagonistic. Initial concerns in Poland and the Czech Republic about the Obama administration\u2019s commitment to their security have been largely addressed, after the US placed fighter jets in central Europe and started holding regular military exercises there. And Poland has been working on its own reset with Russia in recent years.<\/p>\n Read the full article \u00bb<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n
\n<\/strong>Shadi Hamid<\/a>, Director of Research, Brookings Doha Center<\/a>, and Fellow, Saban Center for Middle East Policy<\/a>, Foreign Policy<\/a><\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>Justin Va\u00efsse<\/a>, Director of Research, Center on the United States and Europe<\/a>, and Senior Fellow,\u00a0Foreign Policy<\/a><\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>Bruce Riedel<\/a>, Senior Fellow, Saban Center for Middle East Policy<\/a>,\u00a0Foreign Policy<\/a><\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>Michael E.\u00a0O\u2019Hanlon<\/a>, Director of Research,\u00a0Foreign Policy<\/a> at Brookings, The Sydney Stein, Jr. Chair, and Senior Fellow, 21st Century Defense Initiative<\/a>,\u00a0Foreign Policy<\/a> at Brookings<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong><\/a>Centre for European Reform, October\/November 2012
\nClara M. O\u2019Donnell<\/a>, Nonresident Fellow, Center on the United States and Europe<\/a>,\u00a0Foreign Policy<\/a><\/p>\n