Romney foreign policy adviser Dan Senor struggled to differentiate the GOP presidential candidate’s foreign policy towards Iran from President Obama’s during an appearance on CNBC’s The Kudlow Report, just an hour and a half before the final presidential debate focusing on foreign policy.

Asked directly by host Larry Kudlow about whether Romney would engage in direct one-on-one negotiations with Iran, Senor responded that the former Massachusetts governor would keep all options on the table — just as Obama has promised to do — and did not say if he’d agree to direct talks:

KUDLOW: Let me ask you, Dan Senor, for the record. If Governor Romney were president, would he take a one-on-one meeting with Iran?

SENOR: Look, here is Governor Romney’s approach to Iran: Obviously he wants a diplomatic solution to the Iranian situation. As we said, they are getting closer to closer to nuclear bombs, and we have to deploy a whole range of tools and tactics, economic pressure, diplomatic isolation. Got to make sure that the military threat, that option is credible in the eyes of the Iranians, not that we would use it but that they think it’s credible and diplomatically in terms of engagement. There are a whole range of tools and the governor has said he wouldn’t rule any of those tools out. He doesn’t want to reward bad behavior by the Iranians. Wants to know what the Iranians are sincere to make any decision.

KUDLOW: I’m not sure what the difference is. I’m not sure what the difference is. You’re two both distinguished gentlemen. I’m not sure where the difference is, at least on Iran. [...]

SENOR: The problem is mixed messages. He’s sent mixed messages and lost credibility in negotiating with Iran. Governor Romney will not send mixed messages. He’ll be much tougher.

Watch it:

Since the New York Times reported that Obama has agreed in principle to participate in one-on-one negotiations with Iran, Romney’s team has repeatedly refused to say if he would engage in such talks if he’s elected president in November. The administration has also denied the Times’ claims, but has maintained its policy of being open to direct negotiations.

But judging from Senor’s answer, Romney may also struggle to differentiate his approach towards Iran from Obama’s. Indeed, the Obama administration has repeatedly declared that the military option is on the table, and has built up America’s military presence in the Persian Gulf to act as a check against Iran.

Obama has also applied “intense external pressure” on Iran, signing into law tough sanctions that Romney himself supports. The policy has curbed the country’s oil exports “by more than 1 million barrels a day” and as the New York Times reported, the sanctions “have severely depressed the value of its national currency, the rial, causing higher inflation and forcing Iranians to carry ever-fatter wads of bank notes to buy everyday items.”

Senior Romney campaign foreign policy advisor Dan Senor continued to press the unsubstantiated narrative that the White House deliberately misled the public on last month’s attack in Libya. In an interview aired this morning on NPR’s “Morning Edition,” Senor claimed that the Obama administration purposefully put forward a false story to explain the September attack on a diplomatic outpost in the city of Benghazi:

HOST STEVE INSKEEP: Would an attack like that not happened if Mitt Romney were President?

SENOR: Oh look, there’s — some folks have tried to assert that. We’re simply saying there were security requests for additional security resources; they appear to have been denied. There were a series of misleading statements after the incident claiming that the result – in response to a YouTube video, a spontaneous mob that turned into a terrorist attack. Those we now know aren’t true and yet the administration stuck to those explanations. Those other failures around the region we certainly believe could be addressed by a Romney administration.

Senor’s answer fits into the predominant narrative, that the administration continued to push the video as the cause after it knew otherwise. But in reality, from the beginning the Obama administration has avoided definitively pronouncing a cause for the assault that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.

Senor was specifically referring to the statements from U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice during Sept. 16 interviews on the Sunday talk shows. Rice said at that time that based on available information, the Benghazi attackers highjacked a protest against an anti-Muslim film as cover for the assault and that an investigation was on-going. Rice has since then said, “What you get Day 1, Day 2, Day 14 isn’t the whole story.”

Following Rice’s initial statements, the administration candidly put forward its new thinking, based on evidence as it was acquired. In a Sept. 28 statement, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, as coordinator of the seventeen Federal intelligence offices, said the intelligence community “revised [their] initial assessment to reflect new information.”

In testimony before the House Government and Oversight Committee on October 11th, Under Secretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy elaborated on the shift from the time of Rice’s statements to current administration position. “If any administration official, including any career official, were on television on Sunday, September 16th, they would have said what Ambassador Rice said. As time went on, additional information became available,” Kennedy said. “Clearly, we know more today than we did on the Sunday after the attack.”

Senor’s statement also refers to denied requests for additional security at Benghazi. The requests in question were actually intended for the Embassy in Tripoli — 400 miles away — and would have made little difference during the September attack.

Stevens’ father said this week that “[i]t would really be abhorrent to make this into a campaign issue.” Apparently the Romney campaign is not taking that advice.

When he was with Mitt Romney in Jerusalem last month, top campaign foreign policy adviser Dan Senor made a splash by saying that a Romney administration would greenlight an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Senor quickly clarified in a statement that it was Romney’s “fervent hope that diplomatic and economic measures” will curb Iran’s program. Today, Senor implied those measures weren’t having the right effects on Iran.

Speaking on right-wing radio host’s Bill Bennet’s show, Senor falsely claimed that the international sanctions regime against Iran wasn’t slowing its nuclear progress. He said:

The question is: Are [sanctions] having enough effect to actually slow down the path towards a nuclear weapons capability? And there’s no evidence that it is actually slowing them down.

Listen to a clip:

Senor claim echoes one made by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he appeared with Romney last month in Jerusalem. Netanyahu said, “[A]ll the sanctions and diplomacy so far have not set back the Iranian program by one iota.” Those statements are directly contradicted by the United Nations. A U.N. panel last year reported that the U.N. Security Council sanctions spearheaded by the Obama administration were “constraining Iran’s procurement of items related to prohibited nuclear and ballistic missile activity and thus slowing development of these programs.” A recent Pentagon report seemed to bolster this conclusion with regard to Iran’s missile capabilities. While it’s true that the pressure has not yet caused Iran to buckle, it’s simply not accurate to say the sanctions have not slowed Iran’s program.

As neoconservative analyst Patrick Clawson noted today, “[F]or the most part, Democrats and Republicans no longer show much difference when it comes to Iran policy.” That’s true — to an extent. The main difference is that the Romney camp uses a more belligerent tone, attempts to suppress public discourse about the possible consequences of a strike, and has a lower threshold for war. Senor expanded on the latter point on Bennet’s show, saying that a nuclear “capability” is “just as big a threat” as Iran developing a weapon. But that’s absurd: no one would fear a dismantled gun as much as an assembled one. What’s more, it’s not exactly clear what “capability” means. Robert Wright noted that one could “define the term so broadly that Iran already has a ‘capability’,” leaving Americans guessing as to exactly when a Romney administration would opt to start a war with Iran.

President Obama considers a potential Iranian nuclear weapon a threat to both the security of the U.S. and its allies in the region, as well as the nuclear non-proliferation regime. And he’s vowed again and again to keep all options on the table to deal wtih it. U.S., U.N. and Israeli intelligence estimates give the West time to pursue a dual-track approach of building international pressure and using diplomacy to resolve the crisis. Questions about the efficacy and potential consequences of a strike have led U.S. officials to declare that diplomacy is the “best and most permanent way” to resolve the crisis.

Since his 2008 run for the presidency, Mitt Romney has gotten his foreign policy advice from a gaggle of moderates and neoconservatives and other hawks. In this election cycle, the neoconservatives and other “Cheney-ites” reportedly marginalized moderates on the staff. One of the neocons — Dan Senor, who has been advising Romney since 2006 — seems to have stepped into the breech.

Despite a high profile, Senor came under a brighter spotlight in recent weeks for his role in two Romney campaign moves amid the GOP hopeful’s trip to Israel. Senor grabbed attention by, as one campaign official put it, getting “a little ahead” of Romney by backing an Israeli strike on Iran. Then Romney cited Senor’s book about Israeli entrepreneurship in his heavily criticized remarks that suggested economic disparities between Israelis and Palestinians could be chalked up to “culture.”

In a new report, the New York Times looked into Senor’s role on the Romney campaign and found that Senor is Romney’s “closest” foreign policy adviser and “has had his ear” since at least 2006:

His presence in the tight orbit of advisers around the Republican candidate foreshadows a Romney foreign policy that could take a harder line against Iran, embrace Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and move away from being the honest broker in the conflict with Palestinians.

In light of the Times report, here’s a few items from Senor’s resume that may serve to preview what a Romney presidency may look like:

MENTORED BY BILL KRISTOL: “Beginning with Kristol, who is almost two decades his elder, Senor has flourished under the watch of a succession of father figures,” Tablet reported in a recent profile. Kristol, who led the charge into the Iraq war, has been so eager to bomb Iran that even George W. Bush mocked him as a “bomber boy.”

FLACKING FOR THE U.S. IN IRAQ: Remember those famous “rose-colored glasses” through which the Bush administration viewed the Iraq war — or, rather, used to present the Iraq war to the public? That was Senor, who flacked for the Coalition Provisional Authority through its disastrous reign over Iraq. Washington Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran wrote in his book on the CPA that Senor, who was just 31 when he joined up, did “a masterful job of spinning the media.” He reported that Senor once told reporters: “Well, off the record, Paris is burning. But on the record, security and stability are returning to Iraq.”

WALL STREET HEDGE FUND: Since leaving government, Senor attended Harvard Business School and took up positions in prominent businesses, first at the defense giant the Carlyle Group, then at a Wall Street hedge fund. His boss at the hedge fund, Paul Singer, a “vulture capitalist,” is a major Romney backer who, while speculating on oil, funded a Karl Rove-led group that blamed President Obama for gas prices.

NEOCON PRESSURE GROUP: In 2009, Senor joined forces with Kristol to form the Foreign Policy Initiative, modeling it on the group that spearheaded the campaign for war with Iraq. Most recently, FPI called for direct U.S. military intervention in Syria. (Senor did not sign on, but fellow Romney advisers Robert Kagan, Eric Edelman, Stephen Rademaker, and Max Boot did.)

Now, as the Times reports today, Senor is Romney’s top foreign policy adviser, where he leverages his business ties into “success at hitting such people up for campaign cash.” Romney’s emerging hawkishness and critiques of Obama’s policies sound like they could have come straight from Senor — as they did in his comments about “culture.” The profile in Tablet ran down Senor’s myriad connections to the Israeli right — he even volunteered for the 1993 campaign of hard-liner Benny Begin, who opposes a two-state solution to the israeli-Palestinian conflict. If Senor and his ideological comrades hold as much sway over a Romney presidency as they do over his campaign, the situation in the Middle East could be explosive. Maybe that’s why this “policy” adviser is more often lauded for his flacking and fund-raising.

Speaking to reporters in Jerusalem, a top foreign policy advier to Mitt Romney said the GOP presidential nominee would support an Israeli decision to attack Iran’s nuclear program. The right-wing adviser Dan Senor said Iran should not be able to attain a nuclear “capability” — a significant break in language from state U.S. policy.

Senor told reporters:

If Israel has to take action on its own, in order to stop Iran from developing the capability, the governor would respect that decision.

In a follow-up statement, Senor said, “We should employ any and all measures to dissuade the Iranian regime from its nuclear course, and it is his fervent hope that diplomatic and economic measures will do so,” but that an American attack should remain an option.

While Obama has said an Iranian nuclear weapon is “unacceptable,” declaring a nuclear “capability” an American “red line” that would trigger war sets a lower threshold for U.S. military involvement. The CIA has laid out a specific definition, but the “nuclear capability” language is a complex issue. The word “capability” has a special meaning in the non-proliferation context, but it’s not always clear exactly what. Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), one of the Senate’s most vociferous Iran hawks, said this year, “I guess everybody will determine for themselves what that means.” Hawks in Congress pushed a bill this year to shift the official U.S. “red line” to a nuclear “capability.”

During an appearance with Romney in Jerusalem, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netnayahu said he agreed with Romney’s approach, falsely claiming that “all the sanctions and diplomacy so far have not set back the Iranian program by one iota.” U.N. sanctions have delayed Iran’s nuclear progress. A U.N. ban on selling Iran weapons technologies appears to have set back their ballistic missile programs as well.

President Obama considers a potential Iranian nuclear weapon a threat to both the security of the U.S. and its allies in the region, as well as the nuclear non-proliferation regime. And he’s vowed again and again to keep all options on the table to deal wtih it. U.S., U.N. and Israeli intelligence estimates give the West time to pursue a dual-track approach of building international pressure and using diplomacy to resolve the crisis. Questions about the efficacy and potential consequences of a strike have led U.S. officials to declare that diplomacy is the “best and most permanent way” to resolve the crisis. Obama has also reaffirmed Israel’s “sovereign right to make its own decisions about what is required to meet its security needs.”

Romney has long supported military involvement in the Middle East and still defends President Bush’s preventative invasion in Iraq. In an interview with CNN on Thursday, Romney said, “President Bush took action which he believed, based upon the information that was available to him, both from British intelligence and intelligence in our country and around the world, that Saddam Hussein presented a very serious threat to the world, including the potential of weapons of mass destruction.”

Top foreign policy aid to Mitt Romney Dan Senor today continued the Romney campaign’s increasingly difficult task of trying to differentiate its foreign policy from President Obama’s. When asked what Romney would do differently from Obama on Iran, Senor first mentioned a speech Romney gave on Iran five years ago and then boiled the difference down to more sanctions and some abstract notion of getting “serious about military action”:

SENOR: So to answer your question, one he’s for tougher sanctions, two, he is for projecting to the Iranians that the threat of military action is credible. It is not to say to we should use military force or that the Israelis should use military force but it is important that the Iranians believe that it is serious. No one in the world believes today that the U.S. is serious about military action and if no one else believes it it’s hard to believe that the Iranians believe it.

Watch the clip:

Of course, because Iran with a nuclear weapon is widely considered a threat to both the security of the U.S. and its allies in the region, the Obama administration has declared numerous times that the military option is on the table. And Senor must have missed reports this morning that the U.S. is building up its military presence in the Persian Gulf to check Iran. It appears that the problem for Senor is that the Obama administration has also been very open about the consequences of an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities — which is something war supporters seem to want to ignore.

And on the sanctions front, “[f]ew countries have experienced such intense external pressure” as Iran is currently facing. And it’s unclear what “tougher sanctions” Romney would put in place because Senor never offered any specifics.

But this isn’t the first time one of Romney’s advisers has had trouble providing an alternative to Obama’s Iran policy. Last month Richard Williamson said a “President Romney will seek a negotiated settlement” to the Iranian nuclear stand-off, which incidentally the Obama administration also considers the “best and most permanent way” to end the crisis.

Transcript:

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Vice President Joe Biden’s speech critiquing former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney’s foreign policy positions has received a range of responses. Dan Senor, a Romney adviser who served as the spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, commented that Biden offered a “fantasy narrative” of President Obama’s accomplishments. Another Romney foreign policy adviser, Pierre Prosper, charged that, under the Obama administration, “The United States abandoned its missile defense sites in Poland and Czechoslovakia” — of which the latter dissolved nearly 20 years ago after the fall of the U.S.S.R.

But the strangest criticism came from former U.N. ambassador John Bolton who claimed that a laugh-line in Biden’s speech showed that New York University (NYU) students, where the speech was delivered, don’t believe the president is strong on foreign policy. Bolton explained to Fox News’ Greta Van Sustern:

BOLTON: But I thought the best part of it was at one point, trying to appropriate yet another Republican president, Biden said, ‘you have to speak softly and carry a big stick.’ And then he said, ‘I promise you, President Obama has a big stick.’ And the audience broke out laughing, which is some measure of their belief about how assertive Obama is on behalf of our interests internationally.

VAN SUSTEREN: Yes, it’s — apparently, that’s also going to — that’s made a couple — a lot of — a lot of jokes, too, on the Internet. It is — apparently, that is something that’s not going to go away, at least for a while, for Vice President Biden, that remark.

BOLTON: Yet another one.

Watch it:

It’s unclear if the NYU audience was laughing at, or with, Biden. The Vice President maintained a dead-pan expression during the brief outbreak of laughter.

Indeed, Van Susteren is correct that the “big stick” comment has generated a great deal of attention, although not all of it negative, on the internet. CBS, ABC, NBC and The Huffington Post all published articles with headlines incorporating the statement “Obama ‘has a big stick,’” in the minutes and hours after the speech was delivered.

The fact that Bolton interpreted the laughter as a critical response to the administration’s foreign policy doctrine is bizarre considering the former U.N. ambassador’s penchant for bellicose rhetoric when describing his domination-focused foreign policy positions. Last summer, Bolton opined that the U.S. “should be squeezing and disciplining Moscow, not caressing it.”

On a campaign call just ahead of Vice President Joe Biden’s foreign policy speech today, top foreign policy advisers to presumtive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney attacked the Obama administration’s Iran policy. While emphatically denying that the Romney campaign was threatening Iran with an attack, his advisers Dan Senor and Alex Wong admonished the administration for an honest discourse about what the potential consequences of an attack would be.

Asked by a reporter about Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s comments last week that the Obama administration-led U.N. sanctions program on Iran have been “effective,” the Romney advisers said:

DAN SENOR: (T)he administration has gone out of its way to convey that the military option is not serious. I mean, just look at the things Secretary [of Defense Leon] Panetta has said over the last year, whether it was at the Halifax conference, whether it was the Saban conference at Brookings… He went out of his way to talk about how disastrous military action against Iran would be for the United States, for the global economy, for the region. …

ALEX WONG: The administration has repeatedly talked down the military option and the effectiveness and the (inaudible) of the military option by the united states and Israel.

Listen to a clip of the call here:

Romney’s advisers offer, at best, misleading interpretations of Obama administration policies and statements; at worst, they make claims unsupported by the facts. For example, far from “project[ing] to the world that the military option against Iran is off the table,” Obama has said again and again that all options remain “on the table” to deal with a potential Iranian nuclear weapons program. A potential Iranian nuclear weapon is widely considered a threat to both the security of the U.S. and its allies in the region, and the nuclear non-proliferation regime, though U.S. and Israeli intelligence have not concluded that Iran has made a decision to pursue a weapon.

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