Mitt Romney’s name stands out prominently on the cover of the current issue of Foreign Affairs (July/August 2007). Many in the field of international relations and foreign policy view Foreign Affairs as the premier periodical publishing essays, articles, and reviews on the most critical issues arising in U.S. foreign policy. It is purportedly read by policy makers in Washington at the highest levels, and by governmental leaders from around the world. (Tony Blair, at the time still Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, published an essay titled “A Battle For Global Values” recently in the January/February 2007 issue.)

The current issue of Foreign Affairs is not running an article about Mitt Romney; rather, it is publishing a fifteen-page essay on foreign policy authored by Mitt Romney as part of a series in which “top candidates” for the White House will be expressing their visions for the future of U.S. foreign policy. The first installment contains an essay by Barack Obama and one by Mitt Romney. (Mitt Romney, “Rising to a New Generation of Global Challenges,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2007, pp. 17-32.)

Romney’s Vision for U.S. Foreign Policy

Romney’s essay displays his core experience and abilities as a creative executive who can revamp an obsolete or wasteful and uneconomical model and relaunch it with a plan for success. Noting the paralyzing divisiveness in Washington, Romney invokes Tom Brokaw’s catch-phrase of the “greatest generation”, our parents and grandparents, who prevailed in World War II and the Cold War because of their decisiveness. “In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, America pursued learning and innovation to lead the world in space, technology, and productivity — outcompeting the Soviets and driving them to an economic bankruptcy that matched their moral bankruptcy” (19). Fittingly enough for a U.S. presidential candidate, Romney approaches foreign policy solutions with capitalist/competition-based terminology. What works in the economy should work in foreign policy, and Romney points out that it worked in the Cold War.

America’s foreign policy challenges are far different today than during the Cold War, Romney acknowledges. He focuses on “radical Islam” as the central challenge to U.S. foreign policy: “Radical Islam has one goal: to replace all modern Islamic states with a worldwide caliphate while destroying the United States and converting all nonbelievers, forcibly if necessary, to Islam” (21). But Romney ties this challenge back in with the Cold War by pointing out that this plan, as irrational as it is, “is no more irrational than the policies pursued by Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s and Stalin’s Soviet Union during the Cold War. And the threat is just as real.” Romney’s interest in bringing the Cold War into the discussion is presumably to invoke Ronald Reagan as an ideological guide in his vision, and he specifically mentions Reagan from the beginning.

To confront this and other foreign policy challenges facing the United States in the near future, Romney presents “four key pillars of action”:

1. Building U.S. Military and Economic Strength

Romney invokes Reagan because he argues that America needs to focus on military strength, as Reagan did in addressing the Cold War. Romney makes the following recommendations:

• Add at least 100,000 troops to the military
• Make long-overdue investment in equipment, armament, weapons systems, and strategic defense
• Commit at least an additional $30-$40 billion annually over the next several years to modernize the military, fill gaps in troop levels, ease the strain on the National Guard and Reserves, and support wounded soldiers
• Commit a minimum of 4% of GDP to defense spending

Comparing Reagan/Bush I to Clinton, Romney presents hard numbers. Under the Clinton Administration

[i]t seems that our leaders had come to believe that war and security threats were gone forever; as Charles Krauthammer observed, we took a holiday from history. Meanwhile, we lost about 500,000 military personnel and about $50 billion a year in military spending. The U.S. Army lost four active divisions and two reserve divisions. The U.S. Navy lost almost 80 ships. The U.S. Air Force saw its active personnel decrease by 30 percent. The Marines’ personnel dropped by 22,000. (23)

Recognizing the price tag of these suggestions, Romney notes that waste needs to be reduced in the process of military spending and emphasizes politicians as a main hinderance. He suggests bringing in a team of “private-sector leaders and defense experts” to perform an analysis of military purchasing in which accounts are “thoroughly scrutinized to eliminate excessive contractor and supplier charges and prevent deals for equipment and programs that do more for politicians’ popularity in their home districts than for the nation’s protection” (24). And Romney observes that part of this rationalization process needs to include the realization that the United States cannot remain a military superpower if it has a “second-tier economy”, citing Reagan’s exploitation of the Soviets’ weak economy to overcome their superpower military.

2. Energy Independence

This is one of the most interesting aspects of Romney’s vision for U.S. foreign policy. “Our decisions and destiny cannot be bound to the whims of oil-producing states,” he writes (25). This is nothing new but Romney seems to be taking an “energy revolution” that needs to occur in the United States very seriously, noting that it will be a “bold, far-reaching research initiative that will be our generation’s equivalent of the Manhattan Project or the mission to the moon.” Romney’s ambitious vision is to enable the United States to produce as much energy as it consumes. By doing so, “we 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. At the same time, we may well be able to rein in our greenhouse gas emissions” (25). This nod toward reduction of greenhouse gas emissions signals a refreshing tone on the subject of air pollution.

Unfortunately, some of the approaches Romney suggests for eliminating U.S. dependence on oil-states are unsavory: “It will also mean increasing our domestic energy production with more drilling offshore and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, more nuclear power, more renewable energy sources, more ethanol, more biodiesel, more solar and wind power, and a fuller exploitation of coal.” Again, however, Romney ties in this aspect of his foreign policy vision to the economy, explaining that new technologies developed in this effort would then be licensed to other countries.

Romney concludes sensibly that “even as scientists still debate how much human activity impacts the environment, we can all agree that alternative energy sources will be good for the planet. For any and all of these reasons, the time for energy independence has come” (26).

3. Rethinking and Reenergizing Civilian Capabilities

Romney’s goal as President will be to rationalize the civilian agencies that provide infrastructure and support roles for U.S. assistance abroad and at home. Citing the ability of Hezbollah and Hamas to provide infrastructure and civilian support in Lebanon and Gaza respectively, Romney sees improvement in the U.S.’s ability to provide such a role instead as a key to securing America. He turns to Iraq for an example, stating that “even as we were taking casualties and spending over $7 billion a month on the war, U.S. civilian authorities were fighting over which agency was going to pay their employees’ $11 daily food allowance” (27). Romney seems eminently comfortable in addressing this issue because it is so similar to the way he has transformed and streamlined companies and other failing projects in the past:

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.

Sticking with his Reagan theme, Romney characterizes the need for this type of reform in terms of the creative approach during the Reagan era to tearing down bureaucratic boundaries that inhibited America’s ability to deal with its problems.

4. Revitalizing and Strengthening Alliances

Finally, Romney makes interesting statements against the temptation of unilateralism. True, he strikes a familiar tone in chastizing the United Nations:

Nothing shows the failures of the current system more clearly than the UN Human Rights Council, an entity that has condemned the democratic government of Israel nine times while remaining virtually silent on the serial human rights abuses of the governments of Cuba, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, and Sudan. In the face of such hypocrisy, it is understandable that some Americans would be tempted to favor unilateralism. (28)

But Romney’s focus under this pillar is to help revitalize the economies of moderate Islamic states. He highlights an alarming demographic situation in such states:

In no area is our leadership more important and more urgently needed than the Islamic world. Today, the Middle East is facing a demographic crisis: over half the population there is under 22 years old, and the GDP of all Arab nations put together remains lower than that of Spain. A growing population and a lack of jobs create fertile ground for radical Islam. (29)

In support of his vision for strengthening the impoverished populations of moderate Islamic states (and other impoverished countries) in the fight against “radical Islam”, Romney cites former Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar on the need to approach this enemy through NATO as well as (interestingly) Bono, calling him a leader in the effort to alleviate problems in the vulnerable parts of Africa. In this vein, Romney makes the only direct campaign promise of the essay: “If elected, one of my first acts as president would be to call for a summit of nations to address these issues.” The goal of such a meeting, writes Romney, would be “to create a worldwide strategy to support moderate Muslims in their effort to defeat radical and violent Islam” (30). The summit would lead to the creation of a “Partnership for Prosperity and Progress” that Romney envisions as “a coalition of states that would assemble resources from developed nations and use them to support public schools (not Wahhabi madrasahs), microcredit and banking, the rule of law, human rights, basic health care, and free-market policies in modernizing Islamic states. These resources would be drawn from public and private institutions and from volunteers and nongovernmental organizations.” Citing examples of free trade and robust economies as instruments against extremism, Romney brings the topic back to the Cold War, noting that “[a] critical part of the economic resurgence and peace of postwar Europe was the United States’ support for a unified market and U.S. engagement in cross-country ties” (31).

Far from a new period of U.S. isolationism, Romney intends to increase U.S. exposure to and involvement in the economies and societies of large areas of the world.

Perspective From Abroad

As an American living abroad, Romney’s objectives and approach seem reasonable and even, in some respects, innovative and ambitious to me. If he is able to stick to the course outlined in this essay, the efforts would, I think, be received well abroad. An aide-and-infrastructure approach to Lebanon and Palestine would be truly refreshing, as would American leadership in an effort to improve the economic lives of millions of moderate Muslims worldwide. Using the economy as a key to defeating “radical Islam” has some promise, as does a renewed commitment to proactive American involvement on the humanitarian rather than merely military level. Also promising, nowhere in the essay did Romney include Guantanamo Bay as an element of his envisioned foreign policy. His past statements criticizing calls to close Guantanamo and mentioning the facility as a sign of American resolve have been cause for concern. As I have noted elsewhere, praise of Guantanamo severely hampers Romney’s credibility and forces the conclusion that business acumen does not by itself qualify a candidate for this office — the ability to recognize foreign policy disasters needs to be part of the picture as well. This essay ameliorates much of the concern on that point.

Romney’s commitment to reducing pollution and energy independence will surely resonate in Europe, although suggestions to drill offshore and in the Arctic, and to rely more on coal, are not promising.

Finally, however, and this is certainly very nit-picky, but Romney might be well-advised not to frame the enemy in terms of “radical Islam”. This brings the religion itself too much into the picture and could be exploited to portray Romney as framing the issue as “the West vs. Islam” or even worse “Christianity vs. Islam” when really the struggle is political. Romney should speak in terms of defeating “radical Islamic (or Muslim) terrorists” rather than “radical Islam”. The difference is that in Romney’s formulation, the enemy to be defeated is Islam, even though modified by the adjective “radical”. In the alternative phrasing, the enemy is not Islam but “terrorists”, modified by an adjective that signals that the particular terrorists the world is dealing with now are “radical Islamic” or “radical Muslim” terrorists. This only serves to identify which terrorists and does not bring religion itself into focus to the same extent as Romney’s terminology.