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US foreign policy in Asia—let alone with respect to North Korea—is hardly a headline or vote grabbing issue. And campaign speeches are admittedly not the venue for outlining detailed policy proposals. Nonetheless, the performance of the two presidential candidates at the VFW was underwhelming. The President’s speech can be found here; Mitt Romney’s here.
Romney is still looking for some daylight between his foreign policy views and those of the president. Given that such differences are surprisingly hard to find, outrage needs to be manufactured around second-order issues such as Hugo Chavez and White House leaks. For his part, the President spent fully a third of his speech on highly detailed initiatives for veterans. Given the stresses the Bush and Obama administrations have placed on the military, many of these programs are laudable; nonetheless, the nakedness of the electoral appeal was jarring.
Starting with this blog's vested interest, Obama made a passing reference to the imposition of tough sanctions on Iran and North Korea, although neither have yielded results yet. To gauge how Romney might deal with North Korea we have to treat Iran as a kind of proxy, and unfortunately we see the common fallacy of conflating objectives with strategy. The Republican candidate begins by deriding negotiations (“Yet for all the talks and conferences, all of the extensions and assurances, can anyone say we are farther from this danger now than four years ago?”) Yet in the very next paragraph he states that “negotiations must secure full and unhindered access for inspections” before trailing off into vague statements about doing everything necessary to prevent Iran from getting the bomb. But the president has said the same thing—that all options need to be on the table. Given the wide-ranging nature of the sanctions the administration has imposed—which we have covered in detail—it is doubtful that Romney would be able to do more.
Broadening out from the nuclear question to the rest of Asia, China is another area where Romney is seeking to differentiate himself from the president with little success that we can see. Romney’s comments contained a little more nuance than past statements, including a promise to sustain the mutually-beneficial trade relationship that exists (“It is in our mutual interest for China to be a partner for a stable and secure world, and we welcome its participation in trade.”) But the emphasis was placed on the punitive measures Romney would take, again with the confusion of objective and strategy (“But the cheating must finally be brought to a stop. President Obama hasn’t done it and won’t do it. I will. “) For those who think the President has been passive on this issue, it is worthwhile to scan the various actions the administration has taken against China (USTR list here, WTO list here, with the predictable Chinese countersuits). But Candidate Romney did not mention whether he would stick with an earlier campaign pledge to declare China a “currency manipulator” on day one of his presidency, which is not likely to be the kind of action that would get him off on a good foot.
Turning to the broader strategic direction of the country, it is hard to find the differences over Afghanistan. Romney said he would have listened more closely to his generals, but endorses the 2014 withdrawal which some of the field commanders opposed. For Obama’s part, the President conveniently forgets to mention that his objectives for Afghanistan were much more ambitious than they have become (“Afghanistan good enough”). Even if it is strategically the right thing to do, the idea that we will leave the country in substantially better shape is a massive exercise in self-deception.
Finally, we have to side with the president on one crucial issue that has bearing on the strategic tilt toward Asia. Candidate Romney derides the President for “an arbitrary, across-the-board budget reduction that would saddle the military with a trillion dollars in cuts, severely shrink our force structure, and impair our ability to meet and deter threats.” This is truly disingenuous. Figuring out the path of military spending is not easy to do, but the cuts to which Romney is referring are clearly the sequestrations that will happen as a result of the failure of the two parties to reach a budget agreement. Moreover, the Republicans are now blaming the Democrats for allowing the military cuts to go through, when the whole idea of including them was precisely to hold the Republicans’ feet to the fire on the budget deal, a commitment mechanism that clearly did not work. The President gets the last word:
“Those big, across-the-board cuts, including defense, that Congress said would occur next year if they couldn't reach a deal to reduce the deficit? Let's understand, first of all, there's no reason that should happen, because people in Congress ought to be able to come together and agree on a plan, a balanced approach that reduces the deficit and keeps our military strong.”
Hear, hear. If you want to talk about the underlying sources of American power, military and otherwise, maintaining growth while addressing the looming fiscal constraints on US power is a good place to get serious.
