Mitt Romney’s foreign policy
Mitt Romney outlines his foreign policy recently for the Council on Foreign Relations:
[E]ven the most committed neoconservative recognizes that any successful policy must be grounded in reality and even the most hardened realist admits that much of the United States’ power and influence stems from its values and ideals.
Mr. Romney is no economic nationalist:
The United States’ strength goes beyond its military capacity. Indeed, a nation cannot remain a military superpower if it has a second-tier economy. The weakness of the Soviet economy was a vulnerability that President Reagan exploited. Our ability to influence the world also vitally depends on our ability to maintain our economic lead through policies such as smaller government, lower taxes, better schools and health care, greater investment in technology, and the promotion of free trade, while maintaining the strength of America’s families, values, and moral leadership.
Neither however is he a radical free-trader:
Our military and economic strength depend on our becoming energy independent—moving past symbolic measures to actually produce as much energy as we use…. [W]e would end our strategic vulnerability to oil shutoffs by nations such as Iran, Russia, and Venezuela and stop sending almost $1 billion a day to other oil-producing nations, some of which use the money against us.
Mr. Romney believes neither in defiant unilateralism nor in mushy multilateralism, neither alone in inert reliance on old institutions nor exclusively in revolutionary invention of new ones:
[W]e need to strengthen old partnerships and alliances and inaugurate new ones to meet twenty-first-century challenges. The inaction, if not the breakdown, of many Cold War institutions has made many Americans skeptical of multilateralism…. [Nevertheless,] the United States’ strength is amplified when it is combined with the strength of other nations. Whether diplomatically, militarily, or economically, the United States is stronger when its friends stand alongside it.
Naturally, being Mitt Romney, he proposes to manage the change with proven business methods:
The next president should commit to spending a minimum of four percent of GDP on national defense. Increased spending should not mean increased waste, however. A team of private-sector leaders and defense experts should carry out a stem-to-stern analysis of military purchasing….
Just as the military has divided the world into regional theaters for all of its branches, the work of our civilian agencies should be organized along common geographic boundaries. For every region, one civilian leader should have authority over and responsibility for all the relevant agencies and departments, similar to the single military commander who heads U.S. Central Command. These new leaders should be heavy hitters, with names that are recognized around the world. They should have independent objectives, budgets, and oversight.
In all, Mr. Romney clearly displays his greatest strength: his ability to seek out and listen to well-formed advice, to learn therefrom, and thence to design a coherent policy incorporating fundamental features which neither he nor you nor I nor any other single individual could ever have thought of alone on his own.
This blog, of course, remains skeptical of Mr. Romney’s commitment to free trade. Moreover, it doubts America’s ability (under Mr. Romney or any other president) to shape world history purposely to intended ends, observing that she has never done so successfully before. However—though trade is the blog’s signature issue—it is hardly the sole issue facing the nation today, nor immediately in 2007 the most important. The blog remains open to the idea of supporting a practical, nondoctrinaire free-trader like Mitt Romney in the election of 2008.
Nevertheless, in the unlikely event that Mr. Romney ever asked this blog’s advice in the matter, I should refer him to Duncan Hunter for tutelage. Mr. Hunter is perhaps not quite as bright as Mr. Romney—who is?—but Mr. Hunter is clearly the wiser man in my view when he writes,
American workers are the most productive and innovative labor force in the world. Unfortunately, they are asked to compete in an unfair environment against other workers who make only a fraction of a living wage and are employed by companies that face few, if any, responsibilities to the environment or the long-term prospects of their employees. Our domestic manufacturers are forced to compete against foreign companies that benefit from their country’s currency and regulatory regimes. Ominously, China is cheating on trade and using billions of American trade dollars to build ships, planes and missiles at an alarming rate while, at the same time, taking millions of American jobs. I will reverse this “one-way street†with a new policy of fair trade for the American worker.
Admittedly, Mr. Hunter could use a better speechwriter. His expression targets a different audience than Mr. Romney’s in any case. However, on the issue of trade Mr. Hunter does have the facts right in my opinion.
HJH