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

The negative campaign

An unusual thing happened in the American presidential election last week: the candidates talked about foreign policy.  That’s pretty unusual in most presidential contests, but discussions of foreign policy have been especially rare in 2012.

Mitt Romney, the likely Republican nominee, gave a speech on foreign policy in October 2011.  He has said little on the subject since then, and almost nothing of substance.  He regularly criticizes President Obama as a timid leader in foreign affairs and promises to use American power more vigorously than the incumbent.  But on the foreign policy challenges America faces, he has offered few specifics.

Last week, Romney gave a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, one of the largest organizations of military veterans.  He offered oblique criticisms of Obama’s actions in Syria, his relations with Russia and China, and his negotiations with Iran.  He said that, if elected, he would call for a review of military policy in Afghanistan, but did not specifically disagree with Obama’s plans to withdraw American forces by 2014.

Romney has been most vocal in his criticism of Obama’s dealings with Israel.  He regularly promises to restore the American relationship with Israel, even indicating that his first foreign trip as president would be to Israel.

Part of the explanation for Romney talking more about foreign policy is that he left last Wednesday for his first foreign trip since securing the Republican nomination.  The trip included stops in England, Israel, and Poland.  It’s not uncommon for a presidential candidate to make a trip abroad during the campaign; indeed Obama made such a trip in 2008.  It’s a way for a candidate who is short on foreign policy experience—as Obama was in 2008 and Romney is now—to provide visual images of meetings with foreign leaders and speeches to foreign audiences that may help mitigate the experience deficit.

For Romney this seems especially important because recent public opinion polls, while they show that Americans have more faith in Romney’s ability to restore the economy, also show that on matters of foreign policy they have greater faith in Obama.  Last week’s NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, for example, found that 47 percent of the Americans believe Obama better capable of handling foreign policy to 40 percent for Romney.
Clearly Romney has some work to do on foreign policy, and his trip abroad and his recent speech are part of that effort.

But it won’t be easy to gain much traction against Obama on foreign policy issues.  In 2008, Obama pledged that he would seek to end American military involvement in Iraq, wind down the war in Afghanistan, negotiate an agreement to curtail the Iranian nuclear weapons program, and protect America from terrorist attack.  Even some of his Republican critics have conceded that he’s done a pretty good job of implementing those pledges.  For the first time in decades, the Democrats are not on the defensive about national security policy.  It is one of the strengths upon which Obama intends to build support for re-election.

The world is full of complex challenges in our time, and American presidents are very limited in their ability to shape the course of events abroad.  Like all recent American presidents, Obama has sought to accelerate the construction of a durable solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict.  And like all of them, he has not succeeded.  Despite the elimination of Osama Bin Laden and many other al-Qaeda leaders, terrorism remains a daily threat to America and most other western nations.  The current bloodshed in Syria continues despite the efforts of other nations to bring it to an end. Russia is a stubborn conundrum on that and many other issues.

And then there is China.  There is not one China policy in America, but several.  The U.S. seeks to broaden and deepen its economic relationship with China.  But it also wants China to reform its currency, refrain from its current assertiveness—some would say belligerence—in the East Sea, and improve its human rights policies.  Seeking to accomplish all these objectives simultaneously is a difficult balancing act for American diplomats and especially for the chief diplomat who lives in the White House.

The Republican challenger would like to convince the American people that he can do a better job of managing all these challenges than President Obama has done.  But the absence of specifics, the inability to explain with some precision how his actions would differ from the President’s, has made this a hard sell for Mitt Romney.  Perhaps the overseas travel will raise his profile as a potential leader in the world, but it will probably take more than pictures with foreign leaders and a few speeches on foreign soil to convince the American people that a change in leaders will yield any significant change of course in foreign policy.

G. Calvin Mackenzie