Romney has no foreign policy, but Americans don’t care

Whatever you think of Mitt Romney’s domestic policy, the Republican presidential nominee at least has one. His foreign policy is, let’s say, unformed. The Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida, would have been a good moment to put that right, but you can bet it won’t happen. Of course, Romney is pro-Israel without qualification — we know this much. As for the rest, he looks forward to an “American century” founded on American exceptionalism, surpassing military strength and no more apologising.

The US failures in Iraq and Afghanistan have made the Republicans diffident on foreign policy: The subject is best avoided. Coherence hasn’t been a hallmark of Obama’s foreign policy either. But by killing Osama Bin Laden and expanding the Bush administration’s programme of drone assassinations, the president has taken ‘weak on national security’ off the table, and for electoral purposes this will do.

For the next two months, there aren’t really any other purposes. So long as Israel doesn’t attack Iran and nothing else bad happens, neither side wants or needs clarity on foreign policy. Suppose Romney decided he would like some anyway. What might an intelligent and distinctively Republican foreign policy look like? It so happens that Robert Zoellick, a foreign-affairs veteran of previous Republican administrations, former head of the World Bank and leader of Romney’s transition team for national security, has set one out.

Zoellick gave a lecture last month in London titled, ‘American Exceptionalism: Time for New Thinking on Economics and Security’. It read to me like an application for the position of secretary of state, and got less attention than it deserved. His main theme was that a long tradition in US foreign policy links economics and security.

In Zoellick’s view, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher understood and revived the more equal partnership between capitalism (at home and abroad) and security (national and international). The collapse of Soviet communism vindicated their vision. Now, though, the Great Recession has called global capitalism into question all over again. The US is recovering slowly, Europe is still in dire trouble, emerging economies such as India and China have seen their growth rates subside, and political upheaval has thrown the prospects for North Africa and the Middle East into doubt.

The US must take the lead, Zoellick said, in attacking these issues and can do so by affirming the fusion of economics and security that has guided its strategy in the past. At home, the next administration needs to focus on economic strength through fiscal prudence. Internationally, it should lead by example in advancing global economic integration. “Through twists and turns, the American experience has demonstrated that its greatest asset is its openness ‑ to ideas, goods, capital, people and change,” he said. “Every country makes mistakes — but open countries are quicker to correct theirs — and to forge ahead.”

It’s a sad commentary on today’s Republican Party, however, that a full-throated commitment to openness is something Romney would find problematic. Openness to people is hardly part of the Republican platform. These days the party seems to be more eager to punish supposedly unfair traders than to engage with foreigners or force US producers to raise their game and compete.

Here’s another sad commentary: Many Republicans reacted furiously to Zoellick’s appointment to the transition team. Apparently he’s too moderate, too centrist, too pragmatic and far too soft on China to be given a say — let alone the top foreign-policy job. It was pointed out that managing the transition wasn’t the same as guiding or influencing policy. The party’s hard-liners weren’t much soothed.

So Romney will fight the election without a foreign policy. The party prefers it this way, and the country doesn’t much care.

— Washington Post