Foreign policy: The missing debate

last updated 8 January 2015

Virtually every day, another U.S. soldier dies in Afghanistan, said Fred Hiatt in The Washington Post. Several more were killed last week as Republicans held their convention in Tampa. Yet in his acceptance speech, Mitt Romney did not once utter the word “Afghanistan”—even to thank the 68,000 troops who remain deployed there under increasingly hostile conditions. President Obama, meanwhile, is conducting that war with “split-the-baby ambivalence,” ordering a major surge of 30,000 new troops in 2010 while simultaneously setting 2014 as the U.S.’s departure date. What’s his rationale for sacrificing more of our brave young men and women in a war we’ll soon abandon? Has foreign policy ever “been more absent” in a presidential campaign?

Earlier on, Romney did try to score some foreign policy points, said Nicholas Burns in The Boston Globe. He made the mistake of running to Obama’s right, hurling “thunderbolts against Russia and China” and portraying Obama as “weak-willed and lily-livered.” But this line of attack flopped: Most voters know that Obama killed Osama bin Laden, that he’s waging “an unrelenting campaign against terrorists” in a drone war in Pakistan, and that his diplomatic approach to Iran isn’t much different from the Bush administration’s. Even Republicans can’t agree on what they’d want a President Romney to do abroad, said Brian Katulis in The New York Times.Tea Party neo-isolationists have had enough of expensive foreign wars, and want no part of an intervention in Syria or war with Iran. The party’s neoconservatives, on the other hand, clamor for confrontation not only with Iran, but with Russia and China too. As a sop to them, Romney has proposed adding $2 trillion in defense spending over 10 years—while also somehow cutting taxes and reducing the debt.

Here’s the truth about Romney’s foreign policy, said Trudy Rubin in The Philadelphia Inquirer. It “would likely wind up looking much like Obama’s.” He’d face the same set of bad choices in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Syria. If he backed an attack on Iran, the entire Middle East would be destabilized. As for Romney’s call to jack up defense spending, that will fade if he enters the White House, because “the numbers simply will not add up.” It’s easy to “talk tough” on foreign policy, but projecting American power abroad is now more difficult than ever. Maybe that’s why Romney would rather not talk about it at all.