In principle, much of the rhetoric of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s foreign policy address in Virginia on Monday sounded as if it came from the era of President George Bush. In practice, one needed a microscope to differentiate it from the most of the policies pursued in the past four years by President Barack Obama.
Romney was long on principles but short on details. He was assertive in tone but hesitant with substance. He was impressive with his slogans, less so with pragmatic proposals for change. He asserted that “hope was not a strategy” but refrained from offering a credible alternative.
Nonetheless, Romney sounded and looked presidential; he probably offset, at least partially, the damage he inflicted on himself in his woeful overseas excursion during the summer; he did nothing to subtract from his resounding victory at last Wednesday’s presidential debate. And he often seemed to be inferring a direct link between what he described as Obama’s ineffectual foreign policy and the President’s lackluster and tired appearance in that fateful first confrontation.
Romney was a hawk and a moderate, a neocon and a realist, a romantic and a hard-nosed pragmatist. He promised a tougher and “severer” America, but didn’t show how this new and improved assertiveness would change reality on the ground. He came to bury Obama’s foreign policy but found himself praising - with no acknowledgement, of course - many of its achievements.
He pleased many Israelis and Jews, no doubt, by pledging to erase the “daylight” with Israel and its prime minister, then promised to strive for a “democratic” independent Palestine, presumably the same Palestine that he had trashed in his famous “47%” recording. He adopted Israel’s position on stopping Iran when it reached nuclear “capability”, offering sanctions that are presumably tougher than those instituted by Obama, the same sanctions which are currently bringing the Iranian economy to its knees. And he didn’t explain how he would reconcile between his harsh rhetoric toward China and Russia and the need to enlist the world in tightening the clamps on Tehran.
Romney said he would “ensure” that Syrian rebels were armed, but didn’t say how he would prevent these weapons from reaching al-Qaida. He denounced the Administration’s handling of the killing of the American Ambassador in Benghazi, but praised the Libyan outpouring of pro-American sentiment sparked, one may assume, by President Obama’s policies and his supposedly defeatist “leading from behind.”
In fact, if there was one surprising element in Romney’s speech it was in what sounded suspiciously like a resuscitation of some of the romantic Arab Spring jargon of a battle between “liberty and tyranny, justice and oppression, hope and despair.” It’s the kind of rhetoric that only the most diehard pro-democratization neoconservatives still employ, while all the others contemplate the absolutely democratic election of Egypt’s Islamist president, Mohammed Morsi.
But the importance of the speech, of course, isn’t in its practicality or even coherence, but rather in the very fact of its delivery. It comes against the backdrop of Romney’s significant momentum in the polls in the wake of last week’s debate. With less than a month to go before the elections, even a speech about foreign policy, which normally wouldn’t interest many Americans, is seen as important, just as Thursday’s debate between vice presidential candidates Paul Ryan and Joe Biden has suddenly assumed a cosmic make-or-break aura.
Front Page Features