When all you have is a hammer…

Both right and left (not to mention the middle) have so unanimously condemned Mitt Romney’s “A New Course for the Middle East” that it is unseemly to pile on, but I’ll do it anyway.  He blamed President Obama for everything that has happened in the region, reiterated current U.S. policy goals and offered no idea of what he would do differently.  Rumor has it that Karl Rove had a hand in this.  I certainly can’t believe that Romney’s foreign policy advisors, some of whom sit within yards of where I am writing, would fail to recognize Romney’s lack of attention to ways and means.

But there is a deep reason for the lack of attention to ways and means:  the only instruments the Romney/Ryan budget provides for are military ones, but the goals the candidate lays out require diplomacy, development assistance, state-building, law enforcement cooperation–in a word the whole panoply of civilian foreign policy instruments that they propose to slice well into the bone.  This is a serious mistake, as is the impulse to retreat to fortress embassies and pull up the drawbridge.

What America needs now is more civilian outreach in the Middle East and the Muslim world generally.  Romney and Ryan will not provide anything like the means required.  Instead, they will provide military instruments.  When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.  This fallacy is playing out already in the Sahel, where the U.S. is contemplating the use of drones instead of thinking about strengthening local community resistance to the Muslim extremists who have taken over parts of northern Mali, Niger and Nigeria.

I have no doubt about the importance of military strength and economic vitality in determining what burdens the United States can carry.  Mitt Romney wants to emphasize the former.  Barack Obama wants to emphasize the latter.  I’d like to see someone standing up for what Ambassador Chris Stevens and his colleagues represented:  an approach to the world that seeks to match American interests with the interests of others, enabling the cooperative sharing of burdens and concerted action to reach common goals. Military action is always going to be an expensive option available only in the most challenging circumstances.

Diplomacy and its concomitants are not expensive.  Foreign affairs amounts even today to less than 1% of the U.S. government budget (and less than 10% of the Pentagon’s).  But diplomacy is difficult, time-consuming and all too often confusing.  Americans simply don’t know what their diplomats do and why it is important.  Nor has there been an effective effort at explanation.  An enterprise that citizens don’t understand is not going to find the resources it needs to be effective, which of course leads to a further downward spiral of inadequate funding and disappointed expectations.

I dream of a day when two candidates like Romney and Obama will together declare that in addition to military strength and economic vitality, America needs diplomatic outreach.  Maybe one of our fellow citizens will ask what role they see for diplomacy at the town meeting debate October 16.  Or maybe Bob Schieffer will press the point at the third debate October 22.

The president is not only our commander-in-chief.  He is also our diplomat-in-chief.  I’d like to hear the candidates tell us what they plan to do in that role, and what resources they will require to do it well.

PS:  I missed the semi-official response to Romney.

PPS:  On the issue of our embassy posture, Wendy Chamberlin makes good sense.