fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Romney Traps Himself with Election-Year Ideological Rigidity

Nikolas Gvosdev warns Romney that he is painting himself into a corner with his campaign’s recent foreign policy attacks: This is what makes the response of the Romney campaign, particularly the open letter released earlier this week, troubling. The United States remains the world’s preeminent power, but it is not a global hegemon. Advancing U.S. […]

Nikolas Gvosdev warns Romney that he is painting himself into a corner with his campaign’s recent foreign policy attacks:

This is what makes the response of the Romney campaign, particularly the open letter released earlier this week, troubling. The United States remains the world’s preeminent power, but it is not a global hegemon. Advancing U.S. interest requires the ability to compromise and prioritize. One can certainly criticize where the Obama administration has chosen to compromise and what it has chosen to prioritize—but to suggest that Mitt Romney, if elected president, would somehow have the power to avoid making choices and trade-offs, or that every time an American preference is not upheld, it is due solely to the weakness or fecklessness of the president, is disingenuous. On defense, a president Romney would still have to decide where to make budget cuts and how to reshape U.S. military forces to best defend American interests within the realities of a constrained fiscal environment. Very quickly, he too would have to shift from “campaign mode” to “statesman mode”—with all the ambiguities and shades of gray that come with such a change.

One of the difficulties Romney has had all along in criticizing the compromises and priorities of the Obama administration is that he agrees with Obama’s priorities far more often than he disagrees with them, his disagreements are frequently just tactical and stylistic, and he is compelled for political reasons to exaggerate the extent to which Obama has compromised. Obama hasn’t betrayed any of the states that Romney says that he has, but Romney is committed to telling a story about how Obama harms friends and aids enemies. Those relationships that Obama has arguably managed poorly (e.g., Japan, Pakistan, Brazil, Turkey in 2010-2011) are not ones where Romney actually disagrees with what Obama has done, and there is no domestic political advantage in attacking Obama for being too demanding of other governments or insufficiently attentive to other states’ interests. The differences between Obama and Romney on foreign policy do not lend themselves to the sort of full-throated critique that Romney wants to make, which keeps pushing Romney into positions that he shouldn’t want to take, can’t defend, and probably wouldn’t be able to implement if elected in most cases.

When Romney has declared that Iran will not acquire a nuclear weapon if he is elected, he is setting himself up for failure or he is trapping himself into taking unwise military action to make good on his unwise declaration. There is something more than a little absurd about the ever-adaptable Romney expressing alarm about someone else’s flexibility, but because of the campaign Romney is adopting rigid views that would make it much harder for him later to conduct foreign policy without inviting accusations of betrayal and appeasement from his own side. Indeed, the one argument in Romney’s favor on foreign policy is that he cannot possibly believe what he’s saying now. According to this view, he is just saying these things to satisfy hard-liners in his party, and he will become much less inflexible and ideological once the election is over.

Advertisement

Comments

The American Conservative Memberships
Become a Member today for a growing stake in the conservative movement.
Join here!
Join here