Ian Bremmer

Six months ago, the U.S. election was about the economy, and little else. Nearly everyone agreed that for Mitt Romney to win, he’d have to exploit Barack Obama’s glaring weakness: an economy that was as stubborn as the Congress that refused to rescue it. Unemployment was high, Europe’s future was uncertain and the markets were volatile. Not coincidentally, polls showed the two men neck and neck.

But now Mitt Romney has kicked off the week of the first presidential debate – which is focused on domestic policy – with a foreign policy op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Noting the recent protests over the Innocence of Muslims video and the Iranian nuclear program, Romney writes: “These developments are not, as President Obama says, mere ‘bumps in the road.’ They are major issues that put our security at risk.” Obama’s now just as vulnerable on foreign policy as on the economy, and Romney seems to realize it. So what’s the problem? Voters are still basing their decision overwhelmingly on the economy. Romney has flipped the electoral script, but it’s not a winning strategy. He would be wise to get back on message before it’s too late (which it already may be).

Over the past few months, the global and domestic economies have averted the double-dip disaster that seemed so imminent. The Europeans have made significant strides toward a stronger union, the Supreme Court upheld the Democrats’ healthcare law, Ben Bernanke moved forward with a new round of quantitative easing, the housing sector appears to be growing again, and consumer confidence is at its highest in the last four months. That unemployment remains high and GDP remains weak means that 81 percent of voters still think that the economy is “not so good” or “poor,” according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll. And yet that and other polls show that there’s an even split on which candidate voters think is best equipped to handle the economy.

And so Romney has moved to foreign policy. Over the past couple of months, all the news from the Middle East has been bad. The killing of Osama bin Laden has been overshadowed by a region that is once again restive. Shoddy embassy protection, a U.S.-China relationship that’s tenser now than at any point since the Cold War, broken diplomacy with Russia, cool relations with Israel, an intractable civil war in Syria, and rising attacks on NATO troops from Afghan security forces have all gotten more headlines than revised GDP figures.

Romney has tried to capitalize. Last week at the U.N. General Assembly, Obama offered an address, but skipped meetings with foreign leaders. Romney campaign officials and other Republicans questioned whether Obama’s light schedule meant he wasn’t taking foreign policy seriously. But what was the point in meeting with foreign leaders when there is, at this moment, so little that can practically be done with such obstructive partners? As my mom used to say, if you have nothing nice to say, don’t say anything at all.

The problem with Romney’s new tack is that even if he is successful in framing Obama as a naïve appeaser on foreign policy, few people are going to vote based on it. In a new Quinnipiac poll, 50 percent of voters say the economy is most important in this election, while 17 percent say healthcare, 13 percent the budget, and 7 percent national security.

Foreign policy, then, is just a distraction for Romney, no matter how tempting it may seem. If there is a way forward for Romney with one month to go – and I’m not sure there is – it is to go hard on unemployment, hard on the economy, hard on the deficit. That’s why he picked Paul Ryan to begin with. He was slightly behind in the polls, and he recognized that the big distinction with Obama he could make was on the most important issue of the election. The economy is all he should be talking about.

This essay is based on a transcribed interview with Bremmer.

PHOTO: Republican presidential nominee and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney talks to U.S Senator Rob Portman (R-OH) (R) on his campaign plane en route to Denver, Colorado October 1, 2012, ahead of Romney’s first debate with U.S. President Barack Obama.   REUTERS/Brian Snyder

As the world convened at the U.N. General Assembly last week, the willingness of the Obama administration to risk blood and treasure promoting democracy abroad was on full display: Barack Obama gave a stirring speech defending American values and asking other democracies to adopt them. But Obama’s rhetoric doesn’t tell the whole story. He didn’t deliver his speech until after an appearance on a daytime chat show, in obvious support of his re-election campaign.

Many foreign policy experts have criticized Obama for wasting time with Barbara and Whoopi on The View when he could’ve been engaging with foreign leaders on the East Side of Manhattan. But the experts’ takeaway from Obama’s priorities last week is no different than it has been from the administration’s response to months of civil war in Syria, the teeter-tottering of Libya, the reluctance to pose a credible military threat for Iran and the refusal to engage in the Middle East peace process.

The U.S. is willing to do less on the world stage than it has since the onset of World War Two. In the long term, this reset of foreign policy and military initiatives may yield the country a peace dividend. In the short term, there are three international issues where the situation on the ground is deteriorating rapidly and where, in the past, a U.S. president might have intervened. Let’s look at them:

1. Syria. The Assad regime has engaged in deplorable behavior. But the U.S. has been extremely reluctant to support the opposition without a clear identity, leader or mission beyond overthrowing the regime. Furthermore, nothing about the Libya experience has given the U.S. any reason to do anything differently. It’s completely unclear that U.S. intervention in Syria would put U.S. interests in any better shape in that country, or outside of it. The Iraq lesson was simple – that democracy building is very expensive. And Libya taught us more: Regime change itself hurts and can’t be done on the cheap. Furthermore, when it came time for the U.S. to garner international support for its limited Libya mission, Russia could not ignore Gaddafi’s bombast and promise to exterminate the rebels, and therefore could not block the necessary U.N. resolution. When it comes to Syria, Russia won’t provide international cover for a U.S. intervention. Assad gets a pass, despite his brutal war and the fact that it is beginning to reach into bordering states as well. The knock-on effect is more instability in the Middle East – but that seems to be something the Obama administration has decided it can live with.

2. Iran. Here, the U.S. has actually been doing a good job eliciting international pressure on the regime over its quest for nuclear weapons. Rightly so: This is a bigger, global problem. But how much pressure can be brought to bear on Iran, given what’s going on across the region? The Obama administration can say, “Iran, you can’t develop nuclear weapons, or else,” but the question becomes, “or else, what?” Setting out a thick red line is a big problem in this environment. The U.S., according to reports, is running a rather effective sabotage operation on Iran’s labs, but Israel’s current government is apoplectic that Uncle Sam is not sending in the cavalry. Israel, here, is at great risk of appearing to cry wolf, losing the support it has in the international community should the situation in Iran become worse. And Tehran would, it seems, be more willing to declare itself at war with the U.S. to distract the Iranian public from the pain of economic sanctions.

3. Israel and Palestine. While Israel might look like a loser when it comes to Iran, it’s a winner when it comes to its own territorial dispute, no matter who wins the U.S. election in November. Mitt Romney is on the record as saying the Palestinians don’t seem to want peace. When, if ever, has a major party presidential candidate uttered a statement like that? Neither he nor Obama, in other words, intend to use any political capital on another meaningless accord. The message from U.S. politicians to Jerusalem: “We’re done trying to fix this. No more pressure on settlements, or anything else. Good luck.” Israel gets a nearly free hand to deal with Palestine, because there are enough crises in the world that set off anti-American demonstrations, and there’s little need to create another. What that means for Palestinians, though, is the end of American support for their claims, and possibly the end of restraint by Israel.

What all three situations come back to is that the foreign policy implications of the 2012 election are virtually nil. Americans are consumed by domestic issues like the economy and unemployment. Despite the fact that Romney paints Obama as an apologist, a declinist, an unpatriotic leader-from-behind, both are peddling roughly the same foreign policy. Romney is setting a theme and a tone to attack Obama, but it’s mere background music. Whichever candidate is elected will, for different reasons, tell the military “you’re not going to bomb that.” All the rest is posturing.

This essay is based on a transcribed interview with Bremmer.

PHOTO: U.S. President Barack Obama addresses the 67th United Nations General Assembly at U.N. headquarters in New York, September 25, 2012.   REUTERS/Mike Segar

The media can’t help themselves when it comes to presidential politics, and that’s never been more in evidence than in the current Republican nomination battle. For the press, campaign season is its Olympics, the time when reporters’ bosses open their wallets to send them to far off places like Dixville Notch, New Hampshire and Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and correspondents can make a career on how well they report on the race. Except this year, there is no race. Mitt Romney will be the nominee, and that’s been clear for months.

Yet here’s the lead from today’s Wall Street Journal recap of yesterday’s New Hampshire primary: “Mitt Romney is a long way from claiming the Republican nomination, but he leaves New Hampshire with significant advantages in a field where no single opponent seems well-positioned to stop him or become the obvious alternative to him.” While the reporter may merely be acknowledging the mathematics of the delegates Romney still has to win in primaries across the country, the hedging on Romney’s inevitable victory, to anyone who follows the day-to-day stories in the campaign, rings hollow at best.

With Gingrich, then Santorum, and Bachmann and Cain before them, news stories always turned to polls to explain the latest in the “anyone but Romney” vote. But the story the media should be telling is that polls during campaign seasons historically change the most and matter the least. Flawed methodology and small sample sizes make even the most rigorous polling little more than a one-day snapshot of popular sentiment, yet poll results are often reported as if they were all but recorded in the county clerk’s election rolls.

What we should be reading about when it comes to the nomination are things like the size of each candidate’s ground force, the number of committed staff, an ongoing endorsement tally–in other words, the true measures of a candidate’s strength. By these measures, Romney has an overwhelming advantage and has for months. But for some reason such metrics are mentioned only in passing, if at all, or are left to weekend feature stories, as if the day-to-day news about Romney walking down a street in Manchester to knock on doors had anything to do with his viability as a national candidate.

Part of the problem, albeit unspoken, may be that the media haven’t really warmed to the often robotic and sometimes aloof Romney, and because of that, they are holding back on anointing him as the nominee. They therefore highlight those qualities in him and cite the failure of the Tea Party and evangelicals to coalesce around him, even though Romney has been carrying a majority of the overall support of the party, again, for many months now.

The other problem Romney is facing is that candidates with no chance of winning the nomination are refusing to get out of the race. While some may blame the influence of soft money and Super PACs in putting these campaigns on artificial life support, there are simpler explanations for why Gingrich, Cain, Perry, Santorum, Huntsman and Bachmann all stayed in so long: There’s nothing but upside for them, personally, in doing so. The longer candidates can claim a sliver of the national stage, the better off they are in the long run. For Gingrich and Cain, it helps them sell books and raise their personal profiles. For Santorum and many of the rest, they can position themselves to be important parts of Team Romney in the general election and in a Romney administration. Those who aren’t looking for a spot on Romney’s roster are especially willing to trade the enmity of the future GOP nominee for the media attention that bashing him brings. It’s all about job security. And after all, any publicity is good publicity–fueled by an ever-rotating media spotlight that really shouldn’t be shining on these also-rans in the first place. If Ron Paul, who consistently garners high percentages in polls and now in the New Hampshire primary, is widely acknowledged as being too far outside the Republican mainstream to win the nomination, there’s no way Huntsman, who could do no better than third in New Hampshire, can surge past both to win the nod.

Having been vetted during the GOP primaries in the 2008 cycle, what few skeletons there are in Romney’s closet have likely been thoroughly exhumed and inspected. There’s always the chance of a scandalous surprise to knock him from his perch, but it seems unlikely that the no-swearing, no-drinking, family man Mormon has any such bombshells to worry about. So what’s the net result of the media’s refusal to call this race all but over?

Probably a stronger and stronger platform for Barack Obama in the general election. The longer Romney has to beat back the fringe candidates in the primaries, the less work Obama has to do in the general election. But even that is not Romney’s biggest concern–rather, it’s the improving economy and the continual upward creep of economic and employment numbers–indications the country is getting back on the right track, upsetting his core argument against the incumbent.

Rick Perry has promised to make his last stand in South Carolina, and Jon Huntsman has said that the Florida primary on Jan. 31 will decide who the GOP nominee will be. While it may be fun for both men to dream, they know the race is long over, and the identity of the nominee will be Willard M. Romney. It may be fun for reporters to cover the remaining candidates as the political human-interest equivalent of the Jamaican bobsled team, but this isn’t the Olympics–it’s a national presidential election. It’s time to focus on who Romney is and what his policies as president would be, and how they stack up against Obama’s. With so much at stake for the future direction of the U.S. and its place in the world, anything else is, at best, a disservice to readers.

This essay is based on a transcribed interview with Bremmer.

PHOTO: Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney points to supporters as he stands on stage with his relatives while speaking at his New Hampshire primary night rally in Manchester, New Hampshire, January 10, 2012. REUTERS/Jim Bourg

By Ian Bremmer
The views expressed are his own.

After yet another GOP debate where foreign policy took a near-total backseat to economic and domestic policy, Mitt Romney is in the catbird seat for the nomination. He even locked up the endorsement of Tea Party AND Republican machine favorite, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. Romney’s only problem: it’s October 2011. Not one primary has yet taken place. Romney will have to return to his foreign policy platform to expand it, should he be fortunate enough to make it to the general election. And based on the speech he gave at The Citadel, we can already see that Mitt Romney intends to return to the American exceptionalism of the Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush eras.

For Romney, as for many politicians of both parties in decades past, the United States is not just a big and powerful country. Rather, it is the only country in the world that deserves superpower status. What’s unfortunate for Mitt and his all-star, Bush-heavy foreign policy team is that, these days, that line of thinking is more nostalgic than realistic. (By the way, though Romney was almost bombastic at times, calling Iran’s leaders “suicidal fanatics,” his actual policies are unlikely to reflect or adopt that tone — at least not with his foreign policy team as constituted now.) The idea of the U.S. as the leader of the free world is at a post-WWII nadir. However, that’s not because some other country, like China, has risen to fill the vacuum. No, the fault is wholly our own.

In fact, right now there’s a global debate about whether the U.S. really deserves its superpower mantle, given the political and economic issues of recent years that have unquestionably eroded its leadership position. It’s helpful to compare the two camps:

The exceptionalist camp believes that America’s pole position comes from more than its economic and political power– that it comes from our set of values and worldviews, which no other global power possesses. These types of thinkers believe that no matter how powerful, for example, China, becomes, it can never truly take up the role of global leader, because its policies are fundamentally incompatible with the Western world’s.

Those of us who traveled in the Soviet Union prior to its collapse or in Eastern Europe soon afterwards, saw that dissidents and newly liberated peoples there thought about the U.S. in a different way, because America stood for a set of ideas that represented the gold standard of what free people could aspire to achieve. The non-exceptionalist camp believes less in the U.S. as the most influential country in the world, seeing that influence as having seriously eroded of late. Specifically, the events of the 2000 election, in which the Supreme Court took a vote divided among party lines to place George W. Bush into office, is seen by many as the beginning of the end of the era of U.S. infallibility abroad.

In trying to channel Reagan, Romney is also trying to link Obama to an era of economic and political malaise, to paint him as a modern-day Carter. But Romney is missing the very real toll on U.S global prestige in the last decade and its serious implications for foreign policy. It started with the 2000 election and the erosion of the U.S. as a political gold standard, but with the problems of Enron and Worldcom in the middle of the decade, and then the financial crisis’s roots in the U.S. financial system, America’s reputation as the gold standard of finance also began to crumble. In other words, global leaders aren’t paying as much mind to the Obama administration not because of Obama, but because Obama represents a diminished United States, one that can’t be trusted. This is ubiquitous — and currently playing out between the US and EU, where Timothy Geithner was recently rebuffed by Europe’s finance ministers when he tried to tell them what to do at a meeting in Poland. The world seems a little sick of the idea that America knows best, precisely because recently, it very visibly demonstrated that it does not.

President Obama has left himself vulnerable in the coming election due to his seeming inability to espouse and defend America’s values at home and abroad — his inability, in other words, to symbolically begin to pick up the pieces and rebuild American prestige. He has lost sight of the power of American values and become hyper-pragmatic in his approach to foreign policy. His foreign policy may be an effective one, but, drone-strikes aside, it’s missing the grand gestures that Americans look to in order to reaffirm their place in the world.  And even drone strikes are often, by design, intended as a case-specific alternative to more grandiose — and controversial — measures that could go further to tie military strategy to an overarching ideology.

Yet Romney’s foreign policy seems designed to be nothing more than a Reagan redux — to paper over the faults of the last decade in a way that will be implausible on the world stage. That could come back to hurt him. Romney has identified and gone after President Obama’s weaknesses, and he has struck an early blow in the GOP field as the first candidate to even bother with a foreign policy speech at this stage. That counts for a lot.

The logical result of Romney’s foreign policy, as enumerated in his speech, is the same as the logical result of George W. Bush’s — a unilateralism that could leave the U.S. standing largely alone, diplomatically and militarily. At a time when military spending almost certainly must be cut to fix America’s budget problems, that’s a pose any president can ill-afford to strike.

This essay is based on a transcribed interview with Bremmer.

Photo: Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney (L) holds up a statue of former US President Ronald Reagan presented to him by California Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R) during an Orange County “Change Begins With Us” tour stop at Bassett Furniture in Fountain Valley, California, January 31, 2008. REUTERS/Danny Moloshok