For Republicans, the challenge is actually deeper than being out of power. | REUTERS The GOP's foreign policy muddle

This week’s political uproar over bloodshed in Libya and Egypt was a sharp reminder to Republicans: It’s tough to be the opposition party when it comes to matters of national defense.

And for Republicans, the challenge is actually deeper than being out of power. For more than a generation, stretching back to the age of Vietnam and the Cold War, the GOP has been the electorate’s default choice on national security. Not so this year, when the party and its presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, have struggled to confront both internal divisions and a landscape of global challenges that defy straightforward, doctrinal definition.


It’s not a unique predicament for either political party to struggle on national security issues when the other guys are running the Pentagon, State Department and National Security Council. Both parties are still grasping for overarching policies that make sense of a world beset by still-potent terrorist networks, the unpredictable aftermath of the Arab Spring and an economically ravaged Europe.

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

Still, Republicans aren’t accustomed to fighting an uphill battle when it comes to the country’s defense. For the entire span of the Bush administration, the party was united by its pride in the president’s response to Sept. 11 and its support for the White House’s “freedom agenda” — promoting democracy across the Muslim world, in some cases with the help of the armed force.

Now, up against a Democratic president who seldom passes up a chance to note that Osama bin Laden was eliminated on his watch, the GOP is finding that it’s a whole new political world out there on national security. The strengths and vulnerabilities of both parties have changed, as have the preferences of the electorate. Ideological divisions persist within the Democratic Party, but they’re simply less salient when a Democratic commander in chief is leading the ticket. Up-and-coming Republican stars are more passionate about economic and social policy than geopolitics. To some on the right, it’s starting to feel like the bad old days of the 1990s, when the end of the Cold War left Republicans casting about for a new foreign policy framework, torn between wanting to outflank Democrats on toughness and distrusting expensive military adventures overseas.

A Gallup poll released Thursday showed that for the first time since 2007, voters were just as likely to call Democrats the better party to fight terrorism as they were to name Republicans. Polls have consistently shown that about two-thirds of voters believe the Afghan war, once a symbol of necessary U.S. intervention, is no longer worth fighting.

Jamie Fly, who heads the conservative Foreign Policy Initiative, said it’s been a challenge for Republicans to convince a war-weary U.S. electorate that President Barack Obama’s more cautious, consensus-oriented approach to foreign policy has been a failure.

“The president and his administration have done a good job of trying to convince the American people that they are running a very effective foreign policy that gets results, that is low-cost,” Fly said. “I think that we’re going to start to see, unfortunately — and you’ve started to see this in the last 48 hours — is some of it’s a false sense of stability and a false sense of success.”

Fly, who traveled with Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan on the campaign trail earlier this week, acknowledged that economic hardship at home “has taken a toll on American support for certain activities in the world” — specifically, waging war in places like Afghanistan.

What that means for the GOP — an interventionist-leaning party that has swerved toward more parsimonious fiscal conservatism in the past few years — remains to be seen. So far, the 2012 campaign hasn’t done much to illuminate the question.

“I don’t think there’s been a lot of foreign policy in this campaign. There may have been something the last couple of days on specifics. I think the great concentration has been on domestic policy,” said former New Jersey Gov. Tom Kean, who chaired the 9/11 Commission. “I’m a little unclear myself where the party is these days on foreign policy.”

Nicholas Burns, the former undersecretary of state for political affairs under George W. Bush, said the “Republican Party has a wealth of experience and wisdom on foreign policy,” and called Condoleezza Rice “the leading voice at both [Democratic and Republican] conventions arguing for the United States to remain a world leader.”

But the clarity of Rice’s vision, Burns said, has not carried through to her party’s presidential nominee.

“Gov. Romney’s foreign policy pronouncements on the campaign trail have really amounted to a series of slogans. He hasn’t been able to develop some big, clear themes that would distinguish him from President Obama,” said Burns, who intends to vote for Obama. “This week was a real defeat for the Romney campaign — this injection, by Gov. Romney, of politics into a situation where our embassies and consulates are under siege.”

The embassy attacks of the past few days threw the GOP’s foreign policy dilemma into sharp relief. Faced with violence in two Arab Spring nations, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, the libertarian-leaning tea party hero, called for a withdrawal of U.S. foreign aid. Arizona Sen. John McCain described that position as “idiocy” and said the United States should not abandon the people of Libya as they strive for democracy. Romney lashed the Obama administration’s response to the unrest but had little to say about how he’d handle things differently going forward.

During the Republican presidential primaries, the events of the Arab Spring revealed a diversity of opinion in the GOP field that would have been unthinkable during the Bush years. Tim Pawlenty issued an early call for the ouster of Syrian President Bashar Assad, but other candidates took months to follow suit. Rick Santorum condemned Obama for pressing Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to step down while other Republicans cheered the removal of an autocrat. Rick Perry promised to zero out the foreign aid budget while Romney, Jon Huntsman and others said some spending abroad was essential to U.S. interests.

These days, the hazy Republican foreign policy message emanates from many corners of the party, but it starts at the top with the Republican presidential nominee.

Romney has campaigned in an aggressive tone on foreign policy, accusing Obama of wanting to “apologize for America” and pledging to take a hard-line approach to U.S. enemies. The former Massachusetts governor has vowed to label China a currency manipulator on his first day in office — a promise many of his key corporate donors hope and assume is just rhetoric — and support an Israeli attack on Iran if necessary. Romney has described Russia and its strong-man president, Vladimir Putin, as America’s primary geopolitical antagonist, prompting head-scratching by foreign policy veterans in both parties. He has criticized Obama for setting a firm timeline for withdrawing troops from Afghanistan and for not marching in rhetorical lock step with Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu.

Delving more specifically into the individual, down-ticket foreign policy issues of the day, it’s far from clear in many cases how Romney’s approach would differ from Obama’s, beyond placing greater emphasis on projecting the impression of U.S. strength.

Though Romney slammed Obama this week for his handling of turmoil in Libya and Egypt, the Republican has not spelled out how his approach to those countries would differ in substance. On both Libya and Afghanistan, Romney has urged Obama to explain in greater detail the purpose and status of the American mission in both countries. As far as the Afghan war goes, however, Romney has said he would have to consult with generals before making specific changes to the status quo policy.

On Syria, Romney has made a series of different recommendations for supporting pro-democracy rebels there, but he has not joined other Republicans — such as McCain — in calling for the use of American force. In a Friday appearance on “Good Morning America,” Romney described Obama as having pursued a feckless foreign policy on Iran; but asked if he and Obama had the same “red line” opposition to Iranian nuclear weapons going forward, the Republican answered in the affirmative.

“Yes, and recognize that when one says that it’s unacceptable to the United States of America, that that means what it says. You’ll take any action necessary to present that development, which is Iran becoming nuclear,” Romney said.

New York Rep. Peter King, who chairs the Committee on Homeland Security, called this week’s events an opportunity for Republicans, led by Romney, to reclaim its traditional high ground: “Foreign policy should be our strong point.”

“I think Gov. Romney is going to do very well because underlying the Obama policy is the apology tour, the defensiveness, tone, also the whole anti-Israel issue,” King said. “I’m not happy about the events [of the past few days] but I am pleased that there is going to be a discussion of foreign policy.”

If the turbulence across North Africa and the Middle East has challenged Romney’s policy vision, it’s not as if other Republicans — or Democrats, for that matter — have a stronger, simpler consensus view.

In the aftermath of the Bush administration, there’s no longer a reliable popular constituency for wielding American military might overseas, both due to the human cost and the financial cost of the operations involved.

What’s more, the conflicts both parties are grappling with — at the moment, the embassy riots chief among them — don’t lend themselves to straightforward policy recommendations that are easy to communicate on the campaign trail.

“I don’t think there’s consensus in the Republican [Party] or the Democratic Party. I think there’s a divide in the United States that is completely nonpartisan,” said Danielle Pletka, the American Enterprise Institute scholar and former GOP Senate aide. “There’s no consensus about whether it was wise to be in Libya or not and I think there’s very little consensus about intervention in Syria either.”

Still, Pletka argued that there’s a consistency across most criticism of the White House coming from the right — and if some Republicans have lost their appetite for a muscular foreign policy, they’re not the ones leading the party right now.

“There are fiscal conservatives who believe that in addition to ending spending on entitlements, we ought to end spending on national defense. I think they’re in the minority of the party but they’re definitely there,” she said. “There will absolutely be a lively battle for the soul of the GOP, but at the end of the day, the nominee is not one of those people.”