The Republican foreign policy consensus has collapsed. Which candidate’s worldview will prevail?

On June 21, 2007, Mitt Romney delivered a speech at the annual summer retreat of the American Enterprise Institute in Beaver Creek, Colorado. To coincide with the address, his campaign released a statement explaining the candidate’s vision for fighting the war on terrorism. Re-reading that statement today, it is impossible not to be struck by one of the items on Romney’s agenda: “Launch A New Type Of Marshall Plan Unifying Non-Military Sources Of Power To Support Moderate Muslims.” This initiative, the campaign explained, “will assemble the resources of all developed nations to assure that threatened Islamic states have public schools, micro-credit and banking, the rule of law, human rights, basic health care, and competitive economic policies. Resources would be drawn from public and private institutions, and from volunteers and NGOs.”

It seems safe to say that Romney will not be spending a lot of time on the campaign trail this year talking about improving public education for Muslim children or ensuring that Muslim societies provide good health care for their citizens. That’s because the GOP foreign policy debate has changed profoundly since the last campaign. To understand why, you have to back up to the 1970s, when neoconservatives launched an insurgent campaign against the Republican foreign policy establishment, which at the time was largely composed of realists. For a generation, the two groups tussled; but, by 2008, the neocons had more or less won control of the party. Many realists, from Colin Powell to Brent Scowcroft, began openly distancing themselves from the Bush administration. The neocons were now the establishment. And, within the party, they had no obvious challengers.

As a result, with the cantankerous exception of Ron Paul, most of the 2008 candidates didn’t deviate much from the hawkish, democracy-promoting, nation-building foreign policy vision of George W. Bush. John McCain stood squarely with the president. Rudy Giuliani, too, made clear that he hoped to remake the world in America’s image. Of all the major candidates, Romney’s views were probably the least well-defined and the most complicated. But, to the extent that he had misgivings about Bush’s foreign policy, he mostly kept it behind closed doors—and, in public, largely toed the Bush line.

In the last few years, however, new insurgents began to emerge within the party, and new ideas moved to the center of the debate. The result is not simply that Republican candidates are, on the whole, less inclined to support democratization and nation-building this time around. It’s that the very terms of the GOP foreign policy discussion have changed—or rather imploded entirely, leaving in their wake a difficult-to-parse ideological brew of policy disagreements and competing instincts.

Making sense of this situation is especially complicated because most of the candidates, with the exception of Romney, are just beginning to form foreign policy teams. Still, that doesn’t mean their ideas about the world remain a blank slate. If you spend enough time talking to their official and unofficial advisers, it is possible to develop a sense of where Romney and Michele Bachmann and Tim Pawlenty and Rick Perry fit within the newly fractious world of Republican foreign policy—and what they might do if they win.

