Romney foreign policy speech called vague

Mitt Romney’s foreign policy speech Monday was filled with tough talk and slams of President Barack Obama’s leadership — but little of the clarity Romney has vowed to bring to the Oval Office.

What the Republican nominee’s campaign billed as a major foreign policy address didn’t have much new in it and left some analysts unimpressed. The speech, they said, was much like Romney’s previous swings at laying out a foreign policy: couched in broad ideology and big ambitions and lacking the specifics for how he’d bring any of them about


( Also on POLITICO: Romney: Obama has made U.S. less safe)

Romney seemed eager to use the address to capitalize on the momentum he had from his strong debate performance and to reinforce the image of Obama as a feckless leader in over his head both abroad and at home. However, those looking for clear policy distinctions with the current White House were left wanting.

“There’s absolutely nothing in this speech. This is a repackaging of language that has been a staple of Romney’s campaign since he threw his hat in the ring,” said James Lindsay of the Council on Foreign Relations. “If Romney has a foreign policy strategy, he still has not told us what it is. The governor is very fond of saying hope is not a strategy, but that cuts both ways. He didn’t answer two key questions: what he would do differently and why we should expect what he would do to work.”

( See also: Romney’s foreign policy speech (full text, video))

But one prominent foreign policy analyst, Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, offered qualified praise of Romney for raising the profile of foreign policy issues and for creating a counterbalance to those urging that the U.S. pull back around the world.

“I like the tone of patience and engagement even if I may disagree on certain specific substantive matters,” O’Hanlon said on Fox News just after Romney’s speech. “What Gov. Romney has done is make it easier to debate on both sides in terms of what are the next steps we need to take as Americans.”

Obama partisans panned Romney’s 23-minute speech and his overall rhetoric on international affairs as lacking in substance and nuance.

( PHOTOS: Anti-U.S. protests in Middle East, North Africa)

“There’s an awful lot of rhetoric and things, but when you get to the specifics, you just get the sense he doesn’t know exactly what tools to use,” former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said on a conference call organized by the Obama campaign. “I just find him very shallow….To those not totally into foreign policy, it sounds pretty good, but it’s really full of platitudes.”

Referring to the op-ed on foreign policy that Romney published last week in The Wall Street Journal, Albright added, “I am a professor. If one of my students turned that in, he’d get a ‘C’ because he gave absolutely no specifics.”

Portions of Romney’s speech seemed to reflect a divide in Republican circles between foreign policy experts who have aggressively promoted democracy as a way to advance American goals in the Middle East and others who believe the Arab Spring movement threatens to unleash forces that could be more hostile to the United States and to Israel than the authoritarian regimes.

“The Republican Party and the conservative movements are divided between these two frameworks of analysis and Romney’s doesn’t actually choose between them — which is not to say he’s any worse than Obama,” said Steve Rosen, a conservative former director of foreign policy for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. “The defense of the West’s agenda is not exactly the same as the Freedom Agenda. To some extent, the two things get confused.”

Albright, too, said she saw signs in the speech of a “division” among Romney’s advisers. “You see a little bit of back and forth [reflecting] which particular adviser in whose direction he’s nodding,” she said.

Rosen said Romney’s discussion of aid to the rebels in Syria suggested there was no danger of arms flowing from friendly forces to those who might someday turn them against U.S. forces or Israel.

“He says he will assure the rebels in Syria are armed, but he qualifies that saying he will find the people we can work with. That’s a very reassuring distinction, but in the real world you may not have the luxury of perfect information. In a war-like situation, that’s a decision you make under risk,” Rosen added.

Romney’s speech included only a smattering of policy points that drew clear, substantive distinctions with Obama. In what may have been the only new policy point in the speech, Romney promised to give a single U.S. official control over “all assistance efforts in the greater Middle East.” He also vowed to build “15 ships per year, including three submarines” and to be more aggressive in pursuing free-trade agreements.

On Afghanistan, Romney said he would “pursue” a transition to Afghan security control by 2014, but he seemed to sound more open to extending that deadline if the Afghans aren’t up to the task.

“Afghanistan was largely a punt,” Lindsay said.

Alluding to the looming defense sequester, Romney also warned about “catastrophic cuts” in military spending, though he didn’t detail his previous pledges to increase defense outlays to at least 4 percent of GDP.

Lindsay, who worked on the National Security Council during the Clinton administration in 1996 and 1997, said the specifics Romney did offer didn’t seem directly on message with the chief threat the candidate focused on: that of terrorism by Islamic extremists.

“It doesn’t seem like the lack of destroyers or progress on the [Trans Pacific Partnership trade negotiations] is what has been driving Al Qaeda,” Lindsay said. “There’s a certain disconnect to all of this.”

However, Rosen said maintaining a strong defense posture does help in the battle against terrorism even if it may not be the chief concern of frontline terror operatives or those storming embassies.

“It makes a very great difference to the extent that we can eliminate or neutralize state sponsorship of [terrorist ] organizations,” Rosen said. “I’m very worried about state sponsors and to a very large extent non-state actors gain their ability from state support. … What the Fifth Fleet does in the Gulf is critical” to constraining the threat posed by Iran.

A National Security Council staffer under Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush, Peter Feaver, said there is a lack of coherence to the Obama team’s double-barreled criticism of Romney’s speech, accusing him both of adopting Obama’s policies and of putting the U.S. at risk of a new war.

“How can you pursue policies that are echoing yours and also be an extreme radical?” Feaver asked. He also argued that Obama has moved closer to policies Romney advocates toward countries such as Syria and Iran and that the situation in both countries might be better now if Romney’s approach had been adopted earlier.

During the speech, Romney seemed to declare common cause with those who have risen up against dictators over the past nearly two years. “It is a struggle between liberty and tyranny, justice and oppression, hope and despair,” the candidate said.

However, he also spoke repeatedly of the need to “support our friends,” arguing that Obama had abandoned U.S. allies. But it wasn’t clear how he planned to deal with the many U.S. allies in the region who don’t share values of democracy and civil liberties.

One indication of that ambiguity: Romney declared mid-speech: “I will deepen our critical cooperation with our partners in the Gulf.”

The Gulf countries are largely undemocratic, but the GOP candidate never said whether the U.S. should sacrifice short-term security goals in order to support democracy in the region.

The Obama administration hasn’t cast its lot unambiguously with protesters over authoritarian governments when U.S. strategic interests seem to hang in the balance.

However, in a speech last year, the president did denounce “mass arrests and brute force” in Bahrain and warn that “you can’t have a real dialogue when parts of the peaceful opposition are in jail.”

An analyst of the Arab Spring movements, Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institution, said he was “pleasantly surprised” by Romney’s comments on that subject and the Middle East more broadly.

”Romney was able to articulate a distinct and somewhat coherent message,” Hamid said. He said Romney’s message dovetailed with “the sense in the Middle East that Obama is a weak leader.”

But Hamid said Romney’s vow to stand by allies while also standing for democracy was ultimately irreconcilable. “There was no vision on that, no coherence on that, but there hasn’t been coherence on that in U.S. policy in a long time,” he said.

Hamid also noted that Romney never used the word “Islamist” or said precisely how the U.S. should respond to countries where Islam-based parties win leadership roles in elections.

“If you want to support the democratic transitions in Egypt and Tunisia, you have to support the Islamists,” Hamid said. “You can’t square the circle on that. You have to accept that Islamists are going to come to power and many Republican voters are not comfortable with that….I think that’s why he avoided discussing it.”

While Republicans and many of Romney’s foreign policy advisers frequently mock Obama and his team for believing that he could transform America’s standing in the world through the power of his personality and the change he represented from President George W. Bush, Romney indulged in a bit of that thinking himself Monday.

“In this old [Israeli-Palestinian] conflict, as in every challenge we face in the Middle East, only a new president will bring the chance to begin anew,” Romney declared.