Barron Young Smith: Why the Romney Doctrine Won't Resemble the Bush Doctrine

Barron Young Smith is a former online editor of The New Republic.

The Republican presidential primary has provided ample display of the party’s penchant for bellicosity in foreign affairs, and last night’s debate was no exception. It’s a posture that’s understandably gotten many liberals worried about a reprisal of the famously interventionist Bush Doctrine. “God help us if any of these jokers makes it into the White House,” wrote Fred Kaplan of Slate after watching the previous GOP’s national security debate.

But maybe liberals shouldn’t fret so much. Yes, imagining any of the various Republican novelty candidates as the next commander-in-chief is a frightening prospect. But if we assume that the establishment candidate, Mitt Romney, wins the nomination, it seems unlikely that he’ll be inclined to reenact the presidency of George W. Bush. Indeed, if you take a close look at his foreign policy positions, you’ll find echoes of another Republican president, one who has lately become much more palatable to Democrats: Ronald Reagan.

In recent years, something of a cottage industry has cropped up promoting President Reagan as a canny and relatively pragmatic practitioner of foreign policy. Among liberal historians like James Mann and Beth Fischer, it has become fashionable to cite different elements of Reagan’s national security platform as a positive example. In his book The Icarus Syndrome, for example, Peter Beinart identified Reagan’s mix of nationalistic swagger and military caution as the perfect antidote to the American tendency toward imperial overstretch, writing that Obama “should learn from Ronald Reagan, who scrupulously avoided Vietnam-type military interventions yet found symbolic ways … to make Americans feel proud and strong.”

These revisionists often emphasize Reagan’s hesitance to employ American troops abroad: withdrawing the Marines from Lebanon in 1983, using limited airstrikes to retaliate against Qaddafi, and refusing conservative demands to intervene against the Sandinistas because “those sons of bitches won’t be happy until we have 25,000 troops in Managua, and I’m not going to do it.” (Grenada was the risk-free exception.) It’s clear that, governing in the shadow of the Vietnam era, Reagan was still haunted by our experiences there. Likewise, any desire Reagan may have had roll back the Soviet Union militarily was limited by his deeply felt fear of nuclear retaliation—a fear that ultimately led him to engage Gorbachev and end the Cold War.

President Obama has assimilated many of these lessons...