Conserving American dominance

Mitt Romney’s foreign policy speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars is getting slammed on both the right and left.  There are two problems with Romney’s approach.  One is the absence of specific ideas about how he would approach foreign policy issues, including Iran, China, Afghanistan, Egypt and other serious challenges.  The other is his one big idea:  that good old American resolve and strength will be sufficient to meet any challenge.

The poverty of specific ideas is profound.  Nowhere does Romney tell us how he would do what he claims to be capable of.  Iran will not get a nuclear weapon or even uranium enrichment.  But there are no hints as to how this will be achieved.  China must stop exploiting an artificially weak currency, but how they are to be convinced (and the fact that China has revalued its currency dramatically during the Obama administration) is omitted.  The war in Afghanistan will be pursued to a successful conclusion in the same time frame foreseen by Barack Obama, but what is to be done differently?  Aid to Egypt is to be made conditional, but on what is not clear.

The one big idea is even more troubling.  I would be tempted to call it “triumph of the will” if that rubric had not already been used by others:

It’s a mistake — and sometimes a tragic one — to think that firmness in American foreign policy can only bring tension or conflict.  The surest path to danger is always weakness and indecision.  In the end, it is resolve that moves events in our direction, and strength that keeps the peace.

Without hints as to how they will be applied to specific issues, vague appeals to American strength and resolve are almost guaranteed to lead America into the kind of over-extension of its power that the George W. Bush administration indulged in.  The budget-draining eight years of occupation in Iraq and thirteen years of war in Afghanistan were the unfortunate consequences.  Romney’s implication that more defense spending will somehow improve America’s economic position is just hogwash.

Mitt Romney and those who write his foreign policy speeches have not faced up to the facts of life:  resolve is a virtue only under particular circumstances, costly military power is less important in much of the world than it once was, power today takes many non-military forms and American dominance will persist for most of the next century no matter who is president come January 2013.  The question the next president faces is not so much about where to use American power, but rather how to husband and preserve it for instances in which our national interests are truly at stake.

I confess to thinking that Barack Obama has understood this rather better than Mitt Romney, who shows every sign of being willing to be drawn into prolonged displays of American resolve against adversaries who do not threaten vital American interests.  The country is in no mood for that:  across the political spectrum, Americans are looking forward to containing defense expenditures, not expanding them in a time of budget stringency.

Flag-waving has great virtue in American political campaigns.  No doubt Obama will indulge as much as Romney.  But we need foreign policy restraint and limits on defense commitments today more than we need to set out bold claims to a century of American dominance.  That dominance will last longer if we show restraint.  Resolve needs to be reserved for the instances in which there are real threats to vital American interests.  Certainly that is not the case with Iran’s enrichment of uranium to the levels required for commercial reactor operations.  Nor are China’s currency manipulation and software piracy causes that requires military mobilization.

Romney needs to learn to modulate his excessive enthusiasm for the exercise of American power.  Dominance requires that America conserve, not waste, its  considerable strength.