Mitt Romney and Rick Perry’s positions on Israel are clear enough — they’re for it! But when it comes to Afghanistan, it’s become increasingly difficult to discern which direction the two GOP frontrunners would take the nation.
Romney’s campaign went after Perry last week for playing both rhetorical sides of the Afghanistan issue in their recent debate.
“I think the entire conversation about, how do we deliver our aid to those countries, and is it best spent with 100,000 military who have the target on their back in Afghanistan, I don’t think so at this particular point in time,” Perry said at the time, calling for a transition to Afghan forces.
But the next day, after criticism from the hawkish Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), an unnamed adviser told Foreign Policy that Perry had gotten caught up in the “dynamic of the debate,” which featured more anti-war candidates like Jon Huntsman and Ron Paul, and that “a precipitous withdrawal is not what he’s recommending.” But the same adviser also mentioned that Perry might entertain using only 40,000 troops in Afghanistan — far below numbers either Obama or his generals have suggested is doable so far.
It wasn’t the first time Perry’s foreign policy statements have been parsed. Previously he had been called out for condemning “military adventurism” while also urging Americans to “renew our commitment to taking the fight to the enemy wherever they are before they strike at home,” employing two loaded and contradictory phrases associated with the Bush administration’s foreign policy.
A feature in Foreign Policy dubbed Perry’s approach “hawk internationalist” after interviewing his advisers, which include a who’s who of Bush-era neoconservatives, most notably Doug Feith, who was the administration’s point man on intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war. Perry’s reportedly turned to Donald Rumsfeld to help set up meetings with experts. So it might come as a surprise to see his public statements are — at times at least — less than gung-ho on American intervention abroad.
With the economy front and center, it’s not surprising the candidates aren’t getting too bogged down in foreign policy. But their shifting rhetoric, a stark contrast to the unambiguously pro-intervention leaders of the Bush-era GOP, isn’t a coincidence. The Republican party is considerably more isolationist these days, concerned about the wars’ impact on the deficit and skeptical of progress in Afghanistan.
And it’s not as if Perry is the only one whose been accused of waffling on Afghanistan. Mitt Romney came under fire from Sens. Graham and John McCain (R-AZ) after declaring in a June debate that “One lesson we’ve learned in Afghanistan is that Americans cannot fight another nation’s war of independence.” He quickly followed up by indicating that he would first consult with generals on the ground before coming up with any timetable for withdrawal. Later that month, he criticized President Obama for planning to reduce troop numbers, more firmly planting his flag in the hawk camp.
Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said in an interview that the politics of the moment put the candidates in a difficult, if not impossible, bind. They don’t want to seem too pro-war or too isolationist, but they also want to differentiate themselves from President Obama, who’s essentially outlined the same relatively ambiguous position — we’ll withdraw whenever we can withdraw — that they have.
“The actual policy preferences of either of these candidates is extremely ambiguous right now,” Biddle told TPM. “They’re both finding it hard to reach that middle ground that meets all those constraints at the same time, so they’re flopping around trying to find something.”
On Libya, Romney has offered fairly nuanced critiques as well that make it difficult to differentiate his own position from the White House. In March, Romney simultaneously supported the Libya mission, criticized Obama’s “tentative, indecisive, timid and nuanced” foreign policy, and offered no suggestion as to what he would have done instead as president. The next month he accused the White House of “mission creep and mission muddle” for expanding airstrikes beyond their stated goal of preventing civilian deaths, and quoted former Bush aide John Bolton warning that Obama was setting himself up for “massive strategic failure” by demanding Qaddafi’s removal. Qaddafi’s regime appears to be gone for good, a development that Romney celebrated with no reference to Obama’s policies. In a foreign policy address, Romney later said in a passage on Libya that before sending troops to war the president must “first explain their mission, define its success, plan for their victorious exit, provide them with the best weapons and armor in the world, and properly care for them when they come home,” a vague jab at Obama’s handling of the affair.
Perry, who was not a presidential contender at the time the Libya mission began, has offered few statements on the matter, calling Qaddafi’s fall “cause for cautious celebration.”
As a general policy, Romney has consistently condemned Obama as a wuss on the world stage, saying that his policy “flows from the conviction that if we are weak, tyrants will choose to be weak as well.” The rhetoric certainly makes sense for a Republican primary, but given that Obama has heavily escalated the Afghanistan war, initiated a second military conflict in Libya, and ordered a raid into an allied nation’s territory to kill Osama Bin Laden, it’s difficult to tell from these kinds of lines exactly where the two candidates would differ.
Romney’s informal group of advisers have been characterized by Brookings fellow Michel O’Hanlon as “not a big neocon group,” and instead “pragmatic and realist.” Heather Hurlburt, Executive Director of the progressive National Security Network, described the Romney’s team as “mainstream, realist, small-c conservatives in the foreign policy establishment.”
“You watch Romney and see parallels to his take on domestic issues, where he toggles between what his years in the GOP establishment have taught him, what his instincts are, and what they’re telling him the base wants,” Hulrburt told TPM.
For now, foreign policy is far from the main stage of the presidential primaries, easily overshadowed by the economy and Republican opposition to President Obama’s domestic agenda. But it’s also one of the most contentious issues internally for the GOP, which makes the candidates’ own leanings much less predictable than virtually every other issue in the primaries.
