Taking the Romney critique seriously
Friends will laugh at me, but I’ve decided to take the Lanhee Chen memorandum from the Romney campaign on “The Foreign Policy & National Security Failures Of President Obama” seriously and react in detail. This is silly on my part for several reasons:
- If the Republicans really thought Obama had failed at foreign and national security policy, they would have mentioned it at their Tampa convention.
- The memo gives precious little detail on what Romney would do differently but instead blames Obama for the way the world turns.
- No one is paying attention to foreign and national security policy in an election focused on the domestic economy.
Still, it’s a thoughtful memo, even if harsh, and merits serious consideration. Caveat emptor: I am an Obamista, though I hope a thoughtful one. The memorandum is long, so I am going to deal with it in pieces, over the next week or two (I hope).
Let’s start near the beginning:
President Obama’s failure on the economy has been so severe that it has overshadowed his manifold failures on foreign policy and national security. An inventory of his record shows that by nearly all measures, President Obama has diminished American influence abroad and compromised our interests and values. In no region of the world is the U.S. position stronger than it was four years ago.
I know of no support for these sweeping denunciations. The economic failure with the most severe impact happened before anything Obama could have done, unless you think the president has a magic wand that fixes things that happen before he takes office. The recession started in December 2007, during George W. Bush’s third year in office. The stimulus bill passed Congress in February 2009. The recession officially ended in June 2009. It has been recovery since then. Relatively slow recovery, but faster than under George W. Bush for the private sector (it is public sector jobs that are lagging).
American influence abroad is hard to measure, but Pew polling shows popular “favorability” holding up well. The big shift is in perceptions of whether the U.S. is the world’s economic leader, with China gaining significantly. Whom you blame for that depends I guess on who was responsible for the recession. That cannot be Obama, who wasn’t in office when the recession started. But U.S. manufacturing and exports have begun a remarkable recovery during the Obama administration. That bodes well for future influence.
The notion that the U.S. position in the world is no stronger than it was four years ago would be a big surprise to Muammar Qaddafi, Bashar al Asad, Osama bin Laden, what remains of al Qaeda, the Taliban, Ayatollah Khamenei, Kim Chong Eun… With the end of the war in Iraq and impending withdrawal from Afghanistan, the U.S. military will regain the capacity to react to contingencies around the world, a capacity that has been severely strained since George W. Bush ordered the Iraq invasion in 2003.
Where American capacity to influence is lacking still is on the civilian side: foreign assistance is severely constrained and skewed towards yesterday’s issues. The American diplomatic presence is overly large in places we do not need it, and tiny in places that we do. For the record: I blame Obama for not doing more about that, though the problem predates him and Hillary Clinton. It is not clear what the Congress will do with the State Department’s proposal to spend more than $700 million on Arab Spring countries, helping them complete their democratic transitions. The Ryan budget slices USAID and State Department into the bone, reducing what were already small expenditures to levels not seen in decades.
Next up: Failure #1: No Results In Slowing Or Stopping Iran’s Nuclear Weapons Program
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A comment I left on a piece at “The Economist” a couple of days ago: “An optimum solution for the United States would be if Romney and Obama could somehow share the presidential burden, with Romney in charge of economic policy, and Obama responsible for foreign policy and national security affairs”. (My conclusion regarding economic policy is based more on comparison between their overall statements on the issue than on Obama’s record).
Now, if I were a U.S. citizen (as I hope to become one day), I’d probably vote for Obama this time. The reason is that, even though my views on economy are much closer to Romney’s than Obama’s, I believe that in the existing circumstances America’s global leadership is going to be increasingly important for the maintenance of international political stabilty and, by extension, America’s national security. In that respect, Obama far exceeds Romney.