Top dog for ever

BY ITS end, most people would agree, the 20th century was an American century. Mitt Romney says that he wants the 21st century to be American too. That seems a little greedy. Britain had a good claim to be top nation roughly from the Congress of Vienna in 1815 to the first world war, a hundred years that struck a lot of non-Britons as quite enough of a good thing, thank you very much. Still, accept for the sake of argument that the Republican front-runner is correct when he says that God did not create America to be just “one of several equally balanced global powers”. How does he propose, given the economic rise of China, India and Latin America, the spread of nuclear weapons, and the general bolshiness of assorted Russians, Arabs and Persians, to keep America on top for the whole of the 21st century?

Nobody can accuse Mr Romney of failing to think hard about this question. The subtitle of “No Apology”, the book he published in 2010, is “the case for American greatness”. As befits a man with a 59-point jobs plan, he has now also produced a voluminous “white paper” on foreign policy. To sharpen his thinking, he has assembled a regiment of advisers from every hue of the foreign-policy spectrum. All of this came to a head on October 7th, when Mr Romney set out his vision for a new American century in a speech to military cadets in South Carolina. Unfortunately, the speech and the paper suggest that neither prolonged cogitation nor extravagant consultation have produced much that is new. In foreign policy as in so much else, Mr Romney’s instinct is to cling to the middle, play safe and avoid controversy.

When, for example, would Mr Romney bring the troops home from Afghanistan? Ah, that would depend on “the best recommendation of our military commanders”: in his first 100 days there would be “a full inter-agency review”. Well then, what about Iraq? Good question, but it is “impossible to predict” whether American troops will be required in Iraq when he becomes president in 2013. The Arab spring? It is “double-edged”: democracy is good but jihadism would be bad. Iran? Like Barack Obama, Mr Romney declares that a nuclear Iran is “unacceptable”. He would send aircraft-carriers to the region to make clear “that a military option…remains on the table”. Meanwhile he would tighten sanctions and build defences against Iranian missiles (present American policy in a nutshell). Russia? President Romney would “review” the New START treaty and the other arms-control policies of the Obama administration “to determine whether they serve the best interests” of the United States. China seeks hegemony, but Mr Romney will use carrots and sticks to guide it towards responsible global citizenship.

These are hardly ideas to set the world on fire. And that may be a good thing: you do not want an American foreign policy that sets the world on fire. All the same, there are two jarring aspects to Mr Romney’s caution.

The first is that however you tart it up, a message of broad continuity makes a nonsense of the Grand Old Party’s shrill disparagement of the incumbent president’s foreign policy. As the Republicans tell it, Mr Obama has spent his presidency projecting weakness, leading from behind, apologising for America, denying American exceptionalism and throwing Israel under a bus. Only Ron Paul, the candidate who wants to end America’s wars immediately and bring all the troops home, admits that Mr Obama has prosecuted the war on al-Qaeda at least as robustly as George Bush did, hitting people and places, such as Osama bin Laden in Pakistan and Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, his Republican predecessor did not reach. That has not stopped Mr Romney from calling Mr Obama’s foreign policy “feckless” and accusing him of “an eloquently justified surrender of world leadership”.

Mr Obama has made mistakes in foreign policy, but not the ones the Republicans harp on. “Leading from behind” may turn out to have been a cost-effective way to help America’s allies dispose of Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi. Mr Obama got nowhere in Palestine, but pushing for a two-state solution based on the 1967 border was longstanding American policy, not a betrayal of the Jewish state. The oft-repeated claim that he does not believe in America’s exceptionalism leans on selective quotation from a press conference in which he made it perfectly plain that he did.

Let’s build more warships

In elections, politicians lie. What is more disappointing in Mr Romney is the gap between his lofty aim of perpetual American ascendancy and his unimaginative means. In one respect his difference with Mr Obama is sharp as a pin. Defence spending is inviolable. Mr Romney promises to set a floor for the defence budget of 4% of GDP, and plough any efficiency savings back into the armed forces. In his first 100 days he says he will push the navy to increase shipbuilding from nine to 15 warships a year. It seems that his chief answer to the question of how to ensure American domination of the century is to uphold its military power.

Peace through strength is a snappy slogan. It served Ronald Reagan well against Jimmy Carter. But are more warships really going to stop China from rising or the world becoming a system of more or less equally balanced global powers in the next century? The superpower already spends nearly as much on its armed forces as the whole rest of the world. The argument that defence must be sacrosanct while every other part of the budget may be cut is losing ground even among Republicans. The tea-partiers question it, as do some of Mr Romney’s rivals, including Jon Huntsman, who quit his job as ambassador to China to seek the nomination. All the candidates say that in the long run America’s standing in the world will depend on the power of its economy, and some accept that to restore the economy it will have to spend less on defence. It is a pity the front-runner is in denial.

Origin
Source: Economist