Josh Haner/The New York Times

There’s hardly a paragraph in Mitt Romney’s foreign policy speech at the Virginia Military Institute that doesn’t need clarifying in one way or another.

Take the one where he vows to “restore the permanent presence” of air craft carrier task forces in both the eastern Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf region. It’s all part of the Republican candidate’s attempt to sound tough on Iran. He wants to leave the impression that President Obama is not paying attention to the unpredictable and tumultuous Arab world and can’t be trusted to stop Tehran’s nuclear program.

But the Navy, on average, already keeps two carriers in the Gulf region most of the time as ships come and go or overlap on their stays there. If there is something unique about Mr. Romney’s proposal, it would be useful to hear it.



Mr. Romney also promised to forge closer relations with Israel – how much closer can they get?– and deepen ties with America’s Gulf allies. Conveniently, he never acknowledged that the Obama administration has sold lots of new weapons to the Gulf states and is pursuing nuclear power relationships with several of them.

Last summer, the United States moved significant military reinforcements into the Persian Gulf to deter the Iranian military from any possible attempt to shut the Strait of Hormuz. The administration also increased the number of fighter jets capable of striking deep into Iran if the standoff over its nuclear program escalates. The deployments are part of a long-planned effort to bolster the American military presence in the Gulf region, in part to reassure Israel that Mr. Obama’s commitment to dealing with Iran is solid.

It isn’t just aircraft carriers that are getting Mr. Romney’s attention. In the speech, he reaffirmed an earlier commitment to “restore” the Navy by nearly doubling the pace of building from nine to 15 ships a year, including three submarines. What he didn’t say is that this “restoration” would push the Navy budget to $200 billion per year by 2016, up from $156 billion this year.

Such extravagance is part of Mr. Romney’s attempt to burnish national security credentials by throwing money at the Pentagon and adopting the Cold War “peace through strength” slogan of Ronald Reagan.

But this isn’t the Cold War and the kind of excessive spending Mr. Romney envisions – 4 percent of Gross Domestic Product – is unsustainable in an economic crisis when Mr. Romney and his running mate Paul Ryan have promised to decimate other areas of federal spending and slash the deficit. In an interview with Defense News, Romney adviser and former Navy secretary John Lehman proposed steps, like staff cuts, to cover the increased naval expenditures. But Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute says these strategies would barely begin to cover the cost. Is anyone surprised?