Romney's foreign policy team unloads to David Sanger [NYT]. Michael Crowley is taken aback:
Romney is surrounded by foreign policy experts frustrated enough with him to feed the Times a negative story, to the point of implying that Romney doesn’t thoroughly understand or possibly even even care much about foreign affairs. ("Romney doesn’t want to really engage these issues until he is in office," one adviser confides to Sanger.)
Larison sympathizes. Beinart wonders what this means for the GOP:
Beneath the fratricide in the Romney foreign-policy camp lies the deeper problem that, at least since Sept. 11, GOP foreign policy has largely assumed that limitations of public money and public will should not constrain American foreign policy. And during the primaries, when Romney advocated bombing Iran and rejected negotiations with the Taliban, he embraced those assumptions, too. But now, forced to lay out their candidate’s views in greater detail for a more attentive press corps and a more skeptical general-election audience, the Romney camp is struggling. And they’re going to continue to struggle because ultimately, the problem isn’t Romney. The problem is a Republican foreign-policy narrative that pretends that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the financial crisis have not imposed serious new limitations on American foreign policy.
I find Romney's foreign policy statements rather alarming for their surreal 1960s view of the world. Romney has one template for foreign policy, gleaned from the Cold War. Hence his inability to even recognize Obama's foreign policy (Romney often said in the debates that Obama had "none"). But he will back more intense settlement of the West Bank, a war against Iran, and aggressive hostility to Russia and China. The contrast really is stark this time around – both at home and abroad.
The Dish 