Doug Mataconis doesn’t expect the election outcome to have much effect on foreign policy:

I would submit that it tells us that the most likely outcome of a Romney victory in November would be, for the most part, continuity rather than radical change. Granted, there are concerns to be drawn from the rhetoric that Romney engaged in during the primary campaign regarding foreign policy issues, and which he is likely to continue to push during the General Election campaign. Leaving aside that rhetoric, though, the mainstream of American foreign policy seems to me to be really well set.

There is still a bipartisan foreign policy consensus regarding American “leadership” in the world, and on many foreign policy issues the differences between the parties are tactical or differences of degree and not of kind, so on the whole Mataconis is right to expect “continuity rather than radical change.” That has been true of Obama’s foreign policy, and it would probably be true of the foreign policy of a Romney administration. The candidates offering “radical change” in foreign policy don’t usually receive major party nominations, in no small part because they are offering that very “radical change.”

That said, we don’t have to guess at what a Romney foreign policy would be, we know that the vast majority of his advisers worked in the Bush administration or strongly supported administration policies, and we know the kind and the quality of foreign policy decisions that they helped to produce. On the whole, the Bush foreign policy record was one of incompetence, disaster, and failure. There were some notable successes, which included strengthening ties with India, but they were most notable for being so rare. Some of the high points of Bush’s foreign policy record were the major blunders he could have made but didn’t (e.g., attacking Iran/supporting an Israeli attack) and the bilateral relationships that he didn’t poison with provocative and insulting actions. Romney won’t make all the same mistakes, but based on what we know about his views we can say that there is a very real danger that he would make many of the same errors, and he would do this because he and his advisers are still convinced that they weren’t errors when Bush made them. It’s true that Romney has been forced to make things up or wildly exaggerate relatively small differences to attack Obama on foreign policy, but there are still a few major disagreements.

Mataconis judges that Obama’s foreign policy “hasn’t been all that impressive,” and I don’t disagree. For the purposes of this argument, we also need to consider what U.S. foreign policy during the last three years would have looked like had McCain won the election. Romney’s campaign rhetoric might or might not be a reliable guide to how he would conduct foreign policy once in office, but there is every reason to think that McCain would have followed through on his super-hawkish rhetoric. If we’re not sure how much of a difference the 2012 election outcome will make for foreign policy, we can say with more certainty that the outcome of the 2008 election mattered. There would have been even more continuity with the Bush administration under McCain, there would have been some similarities with how Obama has governed (presumably including the wars in Afghanistan and Libya), but there would have been absolutely none of the restraint or caution that Obama has shown in response to a number of events.

We cannot know for certain that McCain would have responded to events in the same way that he has as a Senator, but we would be kidding ourselves if we claimed that there would not be significant differences in how McCain would have made policy on Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Russia. There would have been other differences, but these are the most obvious ones. As Senator, McCain has agitated for U.S. military action in Libya and Syria, and we can assume that U.S. intervention in both countries would have been more aggressive and in both cases likely would have happened sooner if McCain were President. If McCain had won, it is very likely that the U.S. response to Iranian protests in 2009 would have been involved more U.S. meddling in the hopes of destabilizing the Iranian government, and the U.S. response to many of the popular uprisings in Arab countries would have been more aggressive and even more militarized.

To some extent, complaints about Obama’s relatively more cautious responses are meaningless because of the limits on what the U.S. could have done under any administration, but I assume that if a more aggressive, misguided option were available McCain would take it. One qualification that needs to be made here is that the differences between Obama and McCain can become less meaningful over time. Obama often ends up supporting more or less the same policy that McCain wants, but he usually takes a little longer to get there. That is a difference of temperament and style, rather than policy substance. It isn’t irrelevant (caution is obviously preferable to recklessness), but it is not the kind of difference Mataconis is discussing.

Whether McCain would have ordered attacks on Syrian military targets or started supplying the Syrian opposition with weapons, he would have found a way to entangle the U.S. in another foreign conflict. McCain would have tried to keep some U.S. forces in Iraq. He might not have succeeded because of Iraqi objections, but he would have made the effort to keep American soldiers in Iraq for the foreseeable future. There would have been no “reset” with Russia and relations with Russia probably would have continued to deteriorate to the detriment of both countries and Russia’s neighbors. It is possible that not even McCain would have been so foolish as to launch a war against Iran or to approve of an Israeli attack, but it is conceivable that war with Iran would have already begun by this point with all of the economic havoc that would entail. None of this would have required McCain to make radical changes. All he would have needed to do is take existing Republican hawkish assumptions to their logical conclusions. The same goes for Romney. Even if Romney’s foreign policy just makes changes at the margins, non-interventionists and libertarian and conservative realists can be confident that they will be changes for the worse.