Mitt Romney’s sometimes hawkish foreign policy positions are often at odds with the recommendations of several foreign policy advisers, reports the New York Times. Romney’s circle of foreign policy advisers offers a variety of opinions, but Romney tends to go with the more neoconservatives in the group.
One example from the Times article of an instance where Romney is at odds with some of his advisers is Romney’s assertion that the U.S. should not negotiate with the Taliban, even though many in his circle have argued publicly for negotations. From the Times:
It was just one example of what Mr. Romney’s advisers call a perplexing pattern: Dozens of subtle position papers flow through the candidate’s policy shop and yet seem to have little influence on Mr. Romney’s hawkish-sounding pronouncements, on everything from war to nuclear proliferation to the trade-offs in dealing with China. In the Afghanistan case, “none of us could quite figure out what he was advocating,” one of Mr. Romney’s advisers said. He insisted on anonymity — as did a half-dozen others interviewed over the past two weeks — because the Romney campaign has banned any discussion of the process by which the candidate formulates his positions.
“It begged the obvious question,” the adviser added. “Do we stay another decade? How many forces, and how long, does that take? Do we really want to go into the general election telling Americans that we should stay a few more years to eradicate the whole Taliban movement?”
The Times article also notes that while Romney usually comes down on the side of his neoconservative advisers more in line with former ambassador John Bolton, Romney is also reluctant to get into the specifics of his positions.
“There are two very different worldviews in this campaign,” said one adviser who aligns more often with Mr. Bolton. “But as in any campaign, there are outer circles, inner circles and inner-inner circles, and I’m not sure that anyone knows if the candidate has a strong view of his own on this.” Another adviser, saying he would be “cashiered” if the campaign caught him talking to a reporter without approval, said the real answer was that “Romney doesn’t want to really engage these issues until he is in office” and for now was “just happy to leave the impression that when Obama says he’ll stop an Iranian bomb he doesn’t mean it, and Mitt does.”
