Foreign affairs: the "more enemies, fewer friends" doctrine.

• Author: Traub, James
• Position: WHAT IF HE LOSES?

All of the Republican candidates for president believe that Barack Obamas foreign policy has failed the United States; most of them believe he has failed in the same way. They insist that Obama doesn't really believe in America--that, as Mitt Romney has put it, we have never before had a president "so eager to address the world with an apology on his lips and doubt in his heart." They believe that he has cozied up to enemies like Iran and competitors like China, and walked away from allies like Israel. They view him as a humanitarian with a weak grasp of America's core interests who has presided over a unilateral disarmament. Obama, in short, is a soft man in a hard world--which is pretty much what Republicans have been saying about Democrats since Vietnam.

At the same time, the fact that Obama's rivals are certain that he is wrong does not mean that they have a clear idea--or in some cases any idea--of what is right. At times the candidates' level of ignorance has been stupefying. In early November, then front-runner Herman Cain worried about China becoming a nuclear threat (the country has had nuclear weapons since 1964). At a foreign-policy-only debate held in Spartanburg, South Carolina, two weeks later, Rick Perry vowed to let Europe solve its own fiscal crisis since the euro is a "competitor" to the dollar, and Michele Bachmann concluded that "the table is being set for worldwide nuclear war against Israel." Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney have much more fully articulated views than most of their rivals, but they reach much the same conclusions as the others. As Romney, the most plausible nominee, said in the party's national security debate (held a few days after the foreign policy debate), "President Obama says that we have people throughout the world with common interests. I just don't agree with him. I think there are people in the world that want to oppress other people, that are evil." "Engagement" only encourages those evil forces; the time has come to replace the gentle handshake with the clenched fist.

That, in any case, is how Romney says he would govern America's foreign affairs. But foreign policy, unlike domestic policy, consists chiefly of reactions to unforeseen events, and is shaped as much by those events as by presidential ideology. As a candidate, George W. Bush promised a hardheaded policy based on "interests" rather than "values," but emerged from 9/11 sounding like a Wilsonian idealist determined to democratize the Middle East. Nevertheless, predispositions, basic assumptions about the world, do matter. Bush the candidate took a dim view of multilateralism, and as president he disdained the United Nations in favor of "coalitions of the willing." Bush and his team viewed nation building as socialism on a global scale, and they chose to do as little of it as possible in Iraq and Afghanistan--a mistake Bush admitted in his memoirs. So while it is impossible to say exactly how a Republican's foreign policy will differ from Obama's, it is nonetheless quite clear that the outcome of the 2012 election will have a profound effect on America's behavior in the world.

Strange though it seems, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the great foreign policy dramas of the last decade, will be very little affected by the presidential election: they are destined to fade away no matter who wins in 2012. The Republican candidates insist that, unlike Obama, they will "listen to our generals," but none of them is so rash as to speak of "victory" in Afghanistan, as John McCain did in 2008. The American people have no more stomach for ground wars in the broader Middle East, much as they had none for ground wars in Asia by the early 1970s...