Barack Obama's campaign team has accused Mitt Romney of wanting to pursue the same kind of foreign policy as George Bush that led the US into wars.

The president's campaign claimed the Republican presidential candidate is positioning himself to the right of Bush on foreign policy with a speech Romney is due to make later today.

Extracts of Romney's speech were released on Sunday and outlined mainly his position on the Middle East, provoking claims that he has been repeatedly shifting his line on Libya, Syria, the Palestinian territories and Iran.

On Syria, Romney and his team have offered competing views on how far or how little the US should become involved. Unlike the Obama administration, which has so far resisted allowing rebels to receive arms capable of countering jets, tanks and helicopters, Romney is proposing that US allies in the Middle East lift those restrictions and start supplying the rebels with the arms they have been asking for.

The Obama campaign issued an ad saying Romney had already failed the commander-in-chief test, citing his accident-prone tour of the UK, Israel and Poland in the summer and various comments since then. The ad says: "If this is how he handles the world now, just think of what Romney might do as president."

The Obama team released a 'memo' – in reality a press release – from two of its foreign policy advisers, Michele Flournoy and Colin Kahl, saying that Romney's speech is an attempt to reboot his foreign policy but that "doesn't change the fact that he's repeatedly taken positions outside the mainstream and often to the right of even George Bush".

The pair add: "This is not surprising, given that Romney is advised by the same people who were responsible for some of the worst foreign policy failures in American history, including the Iraq war. And now he wants to take us back to the same with-us-or-against-us approach that got us into wars without getting us out of them."

Flournoy and Kahl said Romney had so far failed to provide details on the big foreign policy issues, such as what he would do differently from Obama in dealing with Iran's alleged pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability.

An Obama campaign spokeswoman, Jen Psaki, said: "We're not going to be lectured by someone who has been an unmitigated disaster on foreign policy every time he's dipped his toe in the foreign policy waters."

This will be Romney's seventh foreign policy speech, with most of the earlier ones being heavily criticised for lack of content.

On CNN on Monday morning, the news anchor Soledad O'Brien engaged in a series of testy exchanges with a Romney media spokeswoman, Tara Wall, over his position on the Palestinian territories. In the secret video released last month of a private speech in Florida, Romney was dismissive of the chances of resolving the Israeli-Palestinian issue, but in the extracts of the speech to be delivered later in Virginia, he talks up the need for an independent Palestinian state. In the secret video, Romney said the Palestinians were not interested in the pursuit of peace and that an independent Palestine could be used by Iran as a launchpad for attacks on Israel.

O'Brien asked Wall which of the two positions Romney was advocating, creation of a Palestinian state or scepticism about the prospect.

Wall responded that Obama had appeared on an entertainment programme rather than meet the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, in New York last month.

"Hold on, just hold," said O'Brien. "My point is: it's completely contradictory. So my question is: which is it? OK, then tell me how it's not completely contradictory in your viewpoint, but don't talk about President Obama at this moment. Answer the question about Governor Romney."

Wall said it was not her personal role to debate foreign policy and suggested putting on foreign affairs experts and "let them go at it and pick this apart the way that you would like to have it picked apart."

"That's unfair," O'Brien replied. "I'm just asking you about your message. That's unfair. I'm only asking you about a contradictory message."

Wall said she rejected the idea that the message is contradictory.