George W. Bush’s playbook

I can do no better in summing up Mitt Romney’s foreign policy speech today than he does himself in the penultimate sentence:

The 21st century can and must be an American century. It began with terror, war, and economic calamity. It is our duty to steer it onto the path of freedom, peace, and prosperity.

Here’s the problem:  the terror, war and economic calamity Romney refers to occurred not on Barack Obama’s watch, but on George W. Bush’s.  And Governor Romney’s foreign policy prescriptions, like many of his domestic policy prescriptions, are drawn from George W. Bush’s playbook.

The few innovations in Romney’s speech at Virginia Military Institute today are hardly worth mentioning.  He wants to see the Syrian revolutionaries get more arms, in particular anti-aircraft and anti-tank weapons, but he fails to say how he will prevent these from being used against us, except to say that those who receive them will have to share our values.  That should fix everything in the arms bazaars of the Middle East.

He says he will support a two-state solution for peace between Palestine and Israel.  Nice to see him return to the mainstream from the extremist wings of Israeli and American politics, which is where he was during the “47%” fund-raising dinner in Florida when he suggested we would kick the can down the road and maybe skip the two-state solution altogether.  Trouble is, the people he pitched that line to are supporting his campaign with fat checks.  He says there will be no daylight between America and Israel, which is code for saying that the Jewish settlements will continue to expand, since that is what Netanyahu’s Israel wants. I fail to understand an American presidential candidate who outsources U.S. policy on the Palestinians to Israel.

In Libya he’ll track down the killers of our personnel, which is exactly what Obama promises to do.  I’d just be curious how those 15 Navy ships he plans to build each year will help in the effort.

He pledges to condition aid to Egypt but makes the conditions both vague and easy to meet:  build democratic institutions and maintain the peace treaty with Israel. There are lots of problems with President Morsy’s Egypt, but you won’t be able to hang him for either of those offenses, yet.

In Afghanistan, he calls the withdrawal the president has pledged a retreat but makes it clear he is not proposing anything very different.

Then there is this on foreign assistance:

I will make further reforms to our foreign assistance to create incentives for good governance, free enterprise, and greater trade, in the Middle East and beyond. I will organize all assistance efforts in the greater Middle East under one official with responsibility and accountability to prioritize efforts and produce results. I will rally our friends and allies to match our generosity with theirs.

The trouble here is that the Ryan budget guts the foreign affairs budget, including foreign assistance.  There won’t be any American generosity to be matched with theirs if Romney is elected.  This is where Romney departs definitively from Obama and shows his reliance on George W.’s playbook.

I hasten to add that I’d be all for organizing our assistance efforts in the greater Middle East under one official.  That would be a good idea.

One last issue:  with all this overload of American values as the basis for our foreign policy, I’m curious what Romney plans to do about Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Kuwait, Jordan, Morocco and other less than fully democratic friends in the region?  They get no mention in this speech, but of course they really can’t be mentioned in a speech that gives unequivocal backing to both our friends and our values.  What would Romney do when there is a choice between the two?  Keep silent would be a good guess.