Romney officials considered a stop in Afghanistan, but that’s now unlikely. | REUTERS Romney weighs foreign-policy tour

Mitt Romney’s campaign is considering a major foreign policy offensive at the end of the month that would take him to five countries over three continents and mark his first move away from a campaign message devoted almost singularly to criticizing President Barack Obama’s handling of the economy, sources tell POLITICO.

The tentative plan being discussed internally would have Romney begin his roll-out with a news-making address at the VFW convention later this month in Reno, Nev. The presumptive GOP nominee then is slated to travel to London for the start of the Olympics and to give a speech in Great Britain on U.S. foreign policy.


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Romney next would fly to Israel for a series of meetings and appearances with key Israeli and Palestinian officials. Then, under the plan being considered, he would return to Europe for a stop in Germany and a public address in Poland, a steadfast American ally during the Bush years and a country that shares Romney’s wariness toward Russia. Romney officials had considered a stop in Afghanistan on the journey, but that’s now unlikely.

Sources stressed that the trip was still being planned but will be finalized internally this week, and some of the details are subject to change. While Romney is likely to lash Obama in his VFW speech, he’s expected to restrain his remarks about the president when speaking abroad.

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Still, the world tour is reminiscent of then-Sen. Barack Obama’s overseas trip in the summer of 2008 and is being planned with a similar goal in mind: to project Romney above the campaign’s daily nitty-gritty and cast him as a plausible commander in chief at ease with foreign leaders and the general public in distant capitals. But the list of countries Romney is considering stops in also reflects implied contrasts he wants to draw with Obama.

Further, the trip marks an acknowledgement from Romney’s campaign that to defeat Obama they must do more than simply hammer the incumbent on jobs. The GOP nominee has faced rising criticism in recent weeks from his own party for offering few policy details and little in the way of a vision.

Romney’s campaign declined to comment about plans for the trip.

Some Republicans, certainly those within Romney’s campaign, believe he has given more specifics on foreign policy than he has been given credit for. They also believe foreign affairs remains a secondary issue in 2012, and one that Democrats are pressing him on for their own advantage, not because voters are focusing on it.

Yet the fear among others in the GOP is that, after four years as the out-of-power party, Romney, now the titular head of his party, is forfeiting a chance to leave an imprint on the foreign policy debate.

“He has spoken out on some things, such as the Chinese human rights issue and the threat of Russia (and it is real, let’s not fool ourselves — Putin has always had visions of being a 21st century czar and this guy in the White House has only emboldened him), but we have yet to see him present his vision for America’s role in the world more broadly (except in really generic talking points),” wrote one veteran Republican foreign-policy watcher, who asked not to be identified, in an email:

“I’m talking about something like the Condi Rice essay in Foreign Affairs in 2000 laying out the Bush vision (which a number of candidates did in 2007 too). The party needs its nominee to lay out a post-Bush, post-Obama foreign policy. [John] McCain’s vision was essentially Bush with less forethought. The country needs and expect a coherent critique from Romney of Obama’s foreign policy and a layout of his vision for the future as well.”

The Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol, one of the more vocal voices on foreign policy on the right, didn’t go that far — arguing that one can’t quite have a “foreign policy plan” the way they can an economic plan.

Still, he said Romney could make more of his trip to the Mideast with other stops beyond Israel.

“I think it would be nice if he went to Afghanistan,” Kristol said. “I think it would be nice if he visited the troops defending the country. I think it would be nice if he went in a very apolitical way.”

Romney has not articulated his Afghanistan policy beyond saying he’d listen to the generals on the ground. Were he to visit the war zone, his team fears, he’d pressed to say more about his plans for the country.

But Kristol argued, “You don’t have to have a completely worked-out policy on … Afghanistan to go and look serious.”

The agenda Romney officials are mulling over now is on far safer political terrain.

VFW conventions are traditional presidential election-year stops by candidates in both parties and will offer Romney a generally friendly audience to lay out a hawkish vision for America’s role in the world.

The trip to London provides Romney with the chance to both reinforce America’s “special relationship” with the United Kingdom and to remind voters of his leadership role in rescuing the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.

Then there will be an unspoken if obvious contrast when the Republican visits Israel, a country that Obama has yet to go to as president and the first place abroad Romney has said he’ll travel to if he wins in November.

In Israel, Romney will, as was first reported by The New York Times, meet with people across the ideological spectrum. He’ll sit down with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but also the Labor opposition, Obama’s envoy to Tel Aviv, Ambassador Dan Shapiro, and the head of the Palestinian Authority. These sit-downs will help Romney push back against the idea that he’s merely in the Jewish state to curry favor with an influential political constituency. But even Republicans are candid about what the Israel trip could mean for the campaign.

“There are a lot of donors and potentially a few voters in places like Florida for which it sticks in people’s craw that Obama hasn’t been there yet,” said one informal foreign policy adviser to Romney’s campaign. It is also a place that resonates with the party’s evangelical base.

Romney’s trek to Poland may not offer the same political dividends but will be as symbolically weighted given recent events and the Republican’s tough talk about Russia.

While Bush famously praised the Polish contribution — “You forgot Poland” — to the Iraq War, the relationship between Obama and Warsaw has not been as warm.

The Poles were angry when Obama in 2009, on the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland, announced plans to back out of a missile shield agreement and have been more generally uneasy about the administration’s “reset” policy toward Moscow.

More recently, Obama infuriated Poles when he misspoke in a White House ceremony and referred to “Polish death camps” when referring to Nazi concentration camps. Then there was the president’s hot mic moment with Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev earlier this year where Obama said he’d “have more flexibility” to deal with missile defense in a second term.

“There’s this sense that America is looking elsewhere, and then there are these horrendous misstatements,” said Andrew Michta, senior transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund and director of the think tank’s office in Warsaw, on the view among Polish elites toward the U.S. administration. “There’s a general perception that the United States is putting distance between itself and Europe. In central Europe, you feel this.”

Michta also noted that Obama has yet to speak at a public event in the country — a contrast with both Bush and former President Bill Clinton.

Romney has taken a hard-line stance toward Moscow, saying after Obama’s overheard conversation with Medvedev that Russia is America’s “No. 1 geopolitical foe.” The remark was seized on by Democrats and criticized by some Republicans as an overreach. Still, other Republicans argue there is enough merit to the claim that Russia needs to be viewed with suspicion that Romney shouldn’t abandon the argument altogether.

Romney officials are hoping to arrange a meeting between the candidate and German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin. While Merkel and Obama have been in frequent contact recently over the European debt crisis, she generally favors a policy of austerity that varies from Obama’s support for government stimulus spending.