Aside from
vague calls for strength, resolve, and ensuring America’s
permanent spot at the top of the global dog pile, Mitt Romney
hasn’t offered much insight into his foreign policy views. One way
to understand his approach to foreign policy is that it’s all
political pandering: He’s against bad people, and voting for Obama.
This view makes some sense in the context of his
ill-advised late night statement attacking President Obama
following riots in Egypt and Libya. The Romney campaign’s first
instinct, it seems, was to repackage the event as a quick,
simplistic political attack.  

It also suggests that Romney can be understood as something of a
conventional GOP hawk. That’s probably true to some extent. But I
think it’s a bit of a mistake to try to lump Romney wholly into any
common foreign policy camp. Instead, I suspect the best way to
describe how Romney understands foreign policy is that he thinks
about it like a corporate consultant, with America, and its unique
business model, competing with the rest of the world’s nations for
dominance in the global marketplace. He wants America to be number
one just like a CEO wants his company to be number one. Indeed, he
sees this leadership as a crucial part of America’s brand. America
has established itself as the market leader, and that’s a valuable
feature of its product line. 

This is exactly how Romney discusses America’s place in the
world in his 2010 book, No
Apology: The Case for American Greatness. As I wrote in my
March
magazine feature on Romney:

No Apology can be “understood as a sort of corporate
strategy document. Except instead of focusing on a particular
business, it offers a strategic vision for all of
America. 

No Apology opens with a survey of the marketplace
for global power. Romney describes the “four strategies to achieve
world power.” There’s the Chinese strategy based on free enterprise
and authoritarian rule, the Russian strategy based on energy
authoritarianism, the Iranian strategy of violent jihad, and the
American strategy, which prizes economic and political freedom. The
presentation-ready, four-part schema all but conjures up a
drop-down projection screen and laser pointer.

Romney outlines these countries’ operational strengths and
weaknesses, their core missions and their potential as threats to
the client’s front-runner status. Jihadism is a “strategy based on
conquest and compulsion”; the Chinese are “an enormously practical
and intelligent people,” but they lack the “rule of law and
regulation that shapes free enterprise elsewhere”; Russia’s power
is based on “energy and commodities” as well as “the strength of
its science and technology sectors.” Later in the book, Romney
widens his scope to examine industrial effectiveness in other
countries, such as Japan, citing consultant’s reports on
international differences in productivity.

Seen through Romney’s eyes, these are America’s competitors,
each with its own business model and product line, organizational
theories and distribution channels. He seems to conceive of his job
as proposing a strategic vision that will help America compete and
retain its position as global market leader. 

In Romney’s view, many of the world’s nations are not our
neighbors, but our competitors, fighting for the same market share
that America is trying to win. That implies a certain level of
aggressiveness. And to hear Romney tell it, President Obama hasn’t
been aggressive enough. As Michael Barbaro
notes at The New York Times, Romney’s book also made a
point of criticizing President Obama for reaching out to America’s
“enemies,” and expressing sympathy toward their plight. To Romney,
that’s a firing offense.

The idea seems to be: You don’t coddle competitors, you beat
them. And you certainly don’t ever back down when they challenge
you. Which may explain why Romney, despite
facing widespread criticism from both Democrats and Republicans
for his response last night,
chose to double down on that criticism this morning by
repeating attacks on Obama—who, after all, is currently Romney’s
chief competitor.