Mitt Romney turned attention to his foreign policy this week, with a largely substance-free and fact-challenged speech on Tuesday and a European tour that will eventually take him to Israel. While Romney has gone to great lengths to avoid talking national security, it’s no secret that neither Romney nor his advisers appear capable of outlining a clear vision of a Romney administration’s foreign policy. What little specifics we do hear sound suspiciously like the Obama administration’s positions. So for those wondering what a Romney presidency might mean for U.S. troops and diplomats, there’s not much to go on.

But what’s troublesome about Romney on foreign policy is what’s cooking behind the scenes. Gen. Colin Powell recently complained that Romney’s foreign policy team is “quite far to the right.” Indeed, veterans of the Bush/Cheney administration “pepper” Romney’s foreign policy team and the so-called “Cheney-ites” are reportedly winning the presumptive GOP presidential nominee’s ear. Here’s an in depth look at some of the key advisers a President Romney will hear from on foreign policy and what we might come to expect in a Romney administration:

JOHN BOLTON

Before advising Romney, Amb. John Bolton served briefly as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. under a recess appointment — awkward from the start because of his lifelong disdain for anything multilateral. After leaving government and taking up a position at the American Enterprise Institute, he turned on the Bush administration for not being hawkish enough on Iran. It’s a note he’s been striking since as a Fox contributor, sometime presidential candidate, and frequent guest on right-wing conspiracy theorists’ radio shows. He cheers for negotiations with Iran to fail, a position that supports his “default setting” of wanting to bomb Iran for any old reason even though he has admitted it might not work. Ominously, Bolton even once suggested a nuclear attack against Iran.

ELIOT COHEN

Just months after the war in Afghanistan began, Eliot Cohen — who “was closely affiliated with the circle of hawks who surrounded Vice President Dick Cheney” — was agitating for a war in Iraq, calling it the “big prize.” As a co-founder of the Project for A New American Century, a neoconservative pressure organization critical to the development of the Iraq War, Cohen helped push the case for toppling Saddam. Though critical of the execution of the Iraq War, Cohen appears to have drawn only the most limited of conclusions, as he was seen as recently as 2009 making the case for a new war in Iran.

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While various right-wing luminaries — including Mitt Romney adviser John Bolton — are defending Rep. Michele Bachmann’s (R-MN) campaign to root out an alleged Muslim Brotherhood infiltration of the U.S. government, many of her Republican colleagues have criticized her campaign. The Huffington Post reports today that many of Bachmann’s fellow members of the House Intelligence Committee are speaking out as well:

“We have a small committee, we work hard together, it’s a very bipartisan committee and we deal with national threats,” said Rep. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.), the ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee. This does not help our committee at all.” [...]

“Given our access to sensitive information, I also believe members of the Intelligence Committee have a special responsibility to exercise caution in making statements about national security concerns,” said Rep. Jim Langevin (D-R.I.), a member of the committee. “The only reasonable action for the authors of these letters to take would be to withdraw their requests.”

“The unfounded allegations made by some members of the Intelligence Committee against Huma Abedin are deeply disturbing — and damaging to the committee’s work and its reputation. The authors discredit themselves and are deserving of no further comment,” added Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.).

House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Rogers (R-MI) initially supported Bachmann’s Muslim Brotherhood witch hunt, calling it “very important,” but he has since backtracked. Referring to Bachmann’s suggestion that Huma Abedin, a top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is working on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood, Rogers said, “That kind of assertion certainly doesn’t comport with the Intelligence Committee.”

A top foreign policy adviser to Mitt Romney told the National Journal that funding for social programs should be cut in order to stave off the looming military spending sequester. While Romney often says that “government doesn’t create jobs,” John Lehman, a special adviser to Romney and co-chair of his campaign’s Defense Working Group, admitted that more government spending will lead to more jobs, but claimed that investing in the military will generate more employment than spending on other domestic priorities:

“If you want to reduce the impact of government cuts on creating jobs, you should be looking more at entitlements” than military spending, John Lehman – an investment banker, a former secretary of the Navy under President Reagan, and a special adviser and co-chair of Romney’s Defense Working Group – said in an interview. [...] Defense cuts particularly hurt the economy, Lehman said in an interview, because defense spending creates more jobs and growth per dollar than entitlements, such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

“If your objective was to maximize jobs, you’d cut entitlements five times more than defense,” Lehman said, citing the fiscal multiplier and advocating the opposite distribution of spending reductions than agreed under the current package.

Conservatives have been arguing for quite some time that funding for programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security should be cut in order to preserve the Pentagon’s bloated budget. John Bolton, another top Romney adviser, has even said that social programs should be cut in order to increase military spending.

But Lehman is wrong to say that military spending creates more jobs. A study released late last year by the University of Massachusetts, Amherst found that non-military spending can create more jobs than money going to defense programs. Averaged between the three domestic spending priorities of clean energy, health care, and education, those areas create about twice as many jobs per dollar spent as military expenditures, according to the study. Moreover, polling shows that Americans would rather cut the military budget in order to reduce the debt and deficit rather than take funding from public retirement and health programs.

And while the defense industry and its allies in Congress claim that the Budget Control Act’s mandated military spending cuts would create massive job losses and hurt the economy, some industry CEOs are starting to speak out, saying the apocalyptic warnings are overblown.

Lehman’s comments highlight the fact that, should be become president, Romney will increase military spending by nearly $2 trillion over the next decade, with no plan on how he will pay for it.

But at least the Romney campaign is now acknowledging that government spending creates jobs.