Romney's Blank Slate Foreign Policy

In the foreign policy chapters of No Apology, Romney delivers remarkably few insights on America's two shooting wars, Iraq and Afghanistan, suggesting that his own views on foreign and defense policy may be undeveloped.

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In the foreign policy chapters of No Apology, Romney delivers remarkably few insights into his views of America's two shooting wars, Iraq and Afghanistan. No doubt the imperatives of publishing explain some of the coyness: a situation can change radically in the weeks between the completion of a book and its publications. No doubt too a potential president wishes to avoid premature commitments.

Still, it is strange how much Romney has to say on preparation for war ("We must add at least 100,000 soldiers to the army and the marines ...." p. 93) and how little about the completion of the wars now being fought.

Yet for all the detail, Romney's thoughts on preparation remain strikingly conventional and bureaucracy bound. He laments the aging of America's manned bomber fleet, but neither endorses renewal of that fleet nor replacement of bombers with unmanned drones.

He insists on the importance of intelligence (check), but has nothing to say to those who worry whether the defects in America's intelligence services involve more than money.

As a sometime ghostwriter myself, I think I can recognize what happened to Romney's two chapters on foreign and defense policy: Romney did not have much to say on the subject, and his writers did not wish to insert their views in place of his own. Result: we do not hear much of the author's own ideas, for the compelling reason that (apart from his fascination with counter-insurgency and cyberwar), they may not exist.

To Romney's credit, the writers of chapters 3 & 4 show much more understanding of their material than the author of the economic history section in chapter 2. Potential voters should infer however that in a Romney administration, it will matter a great deal who is chosen as Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense: the president's own views on those subjects are undeveloped.