VietNamNet would like to introduce a series of articles about the presidential election in the US, by G. Calvin Mackenzie, the Goldfarb Family Distinguished Professor of Government at Colby College  and currently a Fulbright scholar in Vietnam.

Who is Mitt Romney?

As Americans get to know the likely Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, they’re focusing more closely on his past actions and campaign statements as indicators of what policies he might pursue if elected. It’s a common but frustrating game in American politics, about as scientific as astrology and just about as reliable.

World leaders, too, share the frustration. What kind of foreign policy, they wonder, would America pursue with Mitt Romney as president.  

But the available indicators are incomplete and, not infrequently, just plain wrong.  Caution is essential in the business of translating campaign statements into actual policies.  Recall, for example, how hard it would have been for anyone to judge the future policies of presidential candidates who made statements like these:

“He kept us out of war.” (Woodrow Wilson’s campaign slogan in 1916; a month into his second term he asked Congress to declare war on Germany)

“I have said before, but I shall say it again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” (Franklin Roosevelt a week before the 1940 presidential election.)

“We are not about to send American boys 9 or 10,000 miles away from home to do what Asian boys should be doing for themselves.” (Lyndon Johnson in 1964, a few months before committing 100,000 American boys to war in Vietnam.)

Presidential campaigns are imperfect venues for foreign policy debates under the best of circumstances.  They are especially inadequate when an incumbent is seeking re-election.  The incumbent president has a record, typically a mixture of success and failure.  The challenger has little choice but to criticize that record and promise to be bolder, wiser, tougher, and more effective than the incumbent has been.  Foreign policy depends upon nuance and gradualism; presidential campaigns abhor subtlety.

The challenger in the 2012 campaign has as little foreign policy experience as any major party candidate in recent history.  He has never served in the national government or the armed forces, and his adult life has been spent in domestic business and politics.  There is nothing in his experience that helps us understand reliably how he would manage the foreign policy challenges of national leadership.

So we are forced to parse his speeches and draw whatever indications of his policy leanings we can from examining the opinions and records of the people who have become his foreign policy advisers.  
The Romney campaign website is not much help.  It presents a speech on foreign policy that Romney delivered at a military college in October 2011, a speech that repeatedly calls for American world leadership but offers little hint of what the substance or direction of that leadership might be.

One also finds on the website a lengthy white paper on the “American Century” by a former counselor to Condoleeza Rice.  It states at the outset: “The unifying thread of [Romney’s] national security strategy is American strength. When America is strong, the world is safer.”  Similar lines have appeared in the campaign literature of every candidate for president in modern times. No one ever calls for a weaker America.

Perhaps more revealing is the website’s list of 40 Romney foreign policy advisers.  Many of them have well-known foreign policy views. The senior advisors are older and draw much of their experience from the administration of George H. W. Bush.  More than two-thirds of the others, however, worked in the administration of George W. Bush.  

It’s normal, of course, for a presidential candidate to take advice from the foreign policy specialists of his party’s most recent presidents.  But the strong ideological tendencies that dominated foreign policy under the younger Bush are different from the more practical approach of the elder Bush.  To date at least, the views of the younger Bush seem to echo louder through the speeches and campaign literature of Mitt Romney than those of the elder.  Perhaps there is an indication here of the kinds of foreign policies Romney would pursue.

But perhaps not.  In many ways, Romney is a blank slate.  Were he elected, the shape of his foreign policy initiatives would be deeply affected by the people he chose as his senior advisers and by the events and challenges he confronted in office.

In that, of course, he would be repeating a typical American pattern.  One need only recall a remark made by George W. Bush in his first campaign for president: “If we don’t stop extending our troops all around the world in nation-building missions, we’re going to have a serious problem coming down the road.”

However accurate that statement might appear in retrospect, it could not have been a more misleading predictor of the policies pursued by the Bush administration after September 11, 2001.
Caveat emptor.

G. Calvin Mackenzie