Despite Mitt Romney insulting the British, demeaning the Palestinians, irritating Polish Solidarity, and ignoring the traveling press corps, Romney’s campaign and its Republican allies are hailing the presumptive GOP presidential nominee’s recent trip abroad a smash hit. “I think it was a great success,” Romney adviser Stuart Stevens said.

However, the National Journal, reporting that GOPers say the bad trip isn’t that big of a deal, got some veteran Republican operatives on record acknowledging the obvious:

“It comes under the heading ‘seemed like a good idea at the time,’ ” assessed John Pitney, a former Republican National Committee aide and now a political-science professor at Claremont McKenna College. “If the plan was to burnish his foreign-policy credentials and remind people of his leadership at the Winter Olympics, that was a very sensible idea on paper, but in practice it didn’t work out as the campaign had hoped.”

Republican strategist Ed Rogers, a former Reagan aide and a veteran of the Bush-Quayle campaign, awarded the trip a 4 on a scale of 10. “The question always is if you had to do all over again and get the exact same results, would you do it again?” he said. “Well, in this case, no. But it’s not that big of a deal.” [...]

Republican consultant John Feehery, a former House GOP aide, said that the problem boils down to the Romney campaign being unprepared for an unforgiving international spotlight. “The media is throwing fastballs at Mitt Romney’s head and he’s got to do a better job at ducking them,” he said. “What they didn’t anticipate was how hot the media glare was going to be. They wanted to go over there and not make any news and they ended up making some.”

When former Romney rival Rick Santorum, who endorsed the former Massachusetts governor back in May, was asked if Romney’s trip was a success this morning on CNN, he twice dodged the question. “I think the long-term take from this is one that we can go out and make the differentiation between, what a world under Mitt Romney and a Republican administration would be versus the tattered relationships that we have with some of our best and longest and strongest allies,” Santorum said.

Our guess blogger is Philip Ballentine, national security team intern at the Center for American Progress

At a Senate Committee on Foreign Relations hearing last week, Senator Sen. James Risch (R-ID) and Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) treated six four-star Generals and Admirals testifying in favor of ratifying the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) with hostility before questioning their motives and honesty.

At the hearing, the Generals and Admirals spoke unanimously asking for Senate ratification of UNCLOS. Adm. James Winnefeld, the Vice Chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified that joining “will fortify our credibility as the world’s leading naval power and allow us to bring to bear the full force of our influence on maritime disputes.” The other panelists, including the Chief of Naval Operations, the Commandant of the Coast Guard, and the heads of US Northern, Pacific, and Transport Commands, all agreed. The military, business leaders, environmentalists, and labor groups all support ratification.

But some Republicans on the committee opening attacked these top military officials for supporting the treaty. Risch reacted angrily, accusing Commandant Robert J. Papp, Jr. of disrespecting the Committee when he said that America’s non-ratification has prevented the resolution of American maritime disputes with Canada, saying, “Admiral Papp, you know, we sit here every day and it isn’t very often our intelligence is insulted.”

When Adm Samuel Locklear III, the head of U.S. Pacific Command, testified that joining UNCLOS would help America press China on its claims in the South China Sea, Risch fumed that treaty is nothing but, “Flowery speeches, just like the ones we’ve had here today.” He continued to lecture Locklear and the rest of the panel on the situation in the South China Sea, saying, “The gate is open and the rodeo is started!”

Despite the fact that all six panelists specifically said they were offering their independent judgments on UNCLOS, Inhofe dismissed their testimony, saying, “You’re naturally going to reflect anything that comes [from the Commander in Chief]—you have to.” Watch clips from the hearing:

“In continuing their efforts to delay ratification, staunch conservatives in the Senate show their extreme ideological and out-of-touch position by opposing a measure that even their strongest champions—Big Oil, the Chamber of Commerce, and the U.S. military—assure them would secure U.S. economic and national security interests,” said Michael Conathan, Director of Ocean Policy at the Center for American Progress.

In recent years, conservative Republicans have repeatedly questioned military leaders’ motives and honesty when they disagree, notably over the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and Pentagon budget cuts. If America’s top brass cannot get through to Senate Republicans on these security issues, who can?

Mitt Romney’s foreign policy is in tatters. His “quite far to the right” advisers are divided. The candidate has a tendency to needlessly “hyperbolize” his rhetoric and his positions on national security issues are often confusing and incoherent — which may explain why some GOP foreign policy experts aren’t hurrying to endorse Romney or why the campaign “doesn’t really want to engage these issues.”

There’s also perhaps another reason. It doesn’t appear that Romney has any idea how to set himself apart from President Obama’s foreign policy, as the Los Angeles Times put it today:

Romney has roughed up Obama with a hawkish tone — at times bordering on belligerent. Yet for all his criticisms of the president, it has been difficult to tell exactly what Romney would do differently.

He has argued that reelecting Obama will result in Iran having a nuclear weapon — without explaining how. He has charged that Obama should have taken “more assertive steps” to force out the repressive regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad — but has said he is not “anxious to employ military action.” He accused Obama of tipping his hand to the Taliban by announcing a timeline for withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, but also accepts the 2014 timeline.

And it almost seems as if the Romney campaign is looking to Obama for guidance. Soon after a report surfaced that the the Obama administration is considering the approval of arms transfers to Syrian rebels via Arab allies, the former Massachusetts governor announced that he would do the same (however, Obama administration officials publicly oppose militarizing the conflict any further at this point).

The Times points out that one key difference has been on military spending. Obama pushed through nearly $500 billion in cuts over the next ten years (with Congress adding another $500 billion), although military spending will continue to grow in that same period. Romney, however, plans to (needlessly) increase defense spending by nearly $2 trillion with no plan on how he will pay for it.

“A lot is made of Romney’s tough talk with respect to Russia and Iran and China, but even there it’s not like I see a dearth of toughness on the part of President Obama,” Cato Institute foreign policy expert Christopher Preble told the Times. “As a challenger, for someone like Mitt Romney, it really is incumbent on him to draw distinctions and differences. He doesn’t. It allows people to paint with a broad brush [what] they would guess … his response would be.”

This morning on MSNBC, former Secretary of State Colin Powell criticized Mitt Romney’s foreign policy team for being “quite far to the right.” Romney has been “catching a lot of heck from the more regular GOP foreign affairs community. We’re kind of taken aback by it,” Powell said.

Later on the same network, the retried four-star U.S. Army general, referring to Romney’s claim that Russia is America’s “number one geopolitical foe,” had some advice for the presumptive GOP presidential nominee — cut out the hyperbole when talking about foreign policy:

POWELL: I think he really needs to not just accept these cataclysmic sort of pronouncements. I think he really needs to think carefully about these statements because they’re now on the wall for people to see. … Let’s not go creating enemies where none yet exist. Does this mean that we should trust Putin or Medvedev? No. Let’s be mature people and look at the reality of the situation and not find ways to see if we can hyperbolize the situation.

Host Andrea Mitchell noted that Romney is attacking President Obama on his Iran policy, saying he’s “showing weakness.”

“Well I don’t know what Mr. Romney would prefer to do,” Powell said, “The fact of the matter is we need a negotiated solution and the only way you can get a negotiated solution is to talk to the other side.” Watch the clip:

Vice President Biden also recently chastised Romney for his militaristic rhetoric. “[L]oose talk about a war has incredibly negative consequences in our efforts to end Iran’s nuclear quest,” he said, adding that if war with Iran is “what governor Romney means by a ‘very different policy’ then he should tell the American people.”

And if Powell doesn’t know “what Mr. Romney would prefer to do” on Iran, as he said today on MSNBC, neither does anyone else. Romney has no real policy on Iran that differs much from the current administration’s approach. The New York Times reported recently that “when pressed on how, exactly, his strategy would differ from Mr. Obama’s, Mr. Romney had a hard time responding.”

By Colin Cookman

President Obama and other heads of state from NATO and the International Security Assistance Force met in Chicago over the weekend, where they laid out plans for an “irreversible transition of full security responsibility” to the Afghan security forces. Although no decisions have been made about the further reduction in U.S. forces past this fall, the alliance has now formally committed to shifting its combat forces to a supporting role by mid-2013, ahead of the withdrawal of most troops by 2014.

Many uncertainties remain — most immediately the status of negotiations with Pakistan over the reopening of NATO supply routes, and the funding plan for the Afghan national security forces over the coming years, which forms the biggest portion of an Afghan government budget that is still highly dependent on international donors. But pressing Afghan leaders to take responsibility for their country’s future, and for the ensuing political compromises and reforms that will be necessary to sustain the government in a way that does not require large-scale international intervention, is the right course for both U.S. interests and for Afghanistan.

As my colleagues Caroline Wadhams, Brian Katulis and I argued in our recent policy paper, a transition strategy that promotes Afghan’s stability over the medium to long-term requires the U.S. to prioritize diplomatic processes that can work to resolve the political disputes at the heart of the Afghan conflict — rather than pinning the country’s future on the cohesion of its regular and irregular security forces. Although media coverage in the run-up to the summit focused primarily on troop levels and funding pledges, it appears that President Obama focused his bilateral conversations with President Karzai on these issues, and the summit declaration includes strong language in support of reconciliation, good governance, and the importance of transparent presidential elections.

With the news that the United States’ ambassador to Afghanistan, Ryan Crocker, is likely to step down soon, his successor will face the challenge — alongside the other branches of the U.S. government — of making sure that these commitments are not left on the summit drafting table. This effort will require renewed focus from the U.S. and its partners to ensure free and fair elections for Karzai’s successor in 2014, to support an inclusive reconciliation process, and to hold the Afghan government accountable for its management of international donor funds. The international donors conference in Tokyo scheduled for this summer will be the next major opportunity to hold negotiations on this issue on an international scale. NATO and its allies have laid out an increasingly detailed plan for the transition of security responsibility in Afghanistan, but more work will need to be done to develop the processes of political reform and reconciliation that can ultimately support a durable end to the Afghan conflict.

Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Ohio Josh Mandel sat down with the Findlay Publishing editorial staff this week to discuss the various issues in the campaign. When he eventually got to foreign policy and defense issues, Mandel picked up on a baseless theme the GOP presidential candidates have been hawking: Obama is friendlier to America’s enemies than its allies. Mandel chastised the president for allegedly trying to “sip tea” with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad while treating countries such as Israel, England, Honduras and Columbia “like garbage”:

MANDEL: I also think when it comes to defense, we need a foreign policy of peace through strength, and a foreign policy of clarity. It sickens me to see the President of the United States literally and figuratively bow down to leaders of other countries. I also believe that he was incorrect to try and sip tea and sing Kumbaya with people like Ahmadinejad in Iran and Chavez in Venezuela at the same time that he’s treated some of our best allies throughout the world like garbage.

You look like at the way he treats Honduras and England and Colombia and Israel and some of our other best allies, it just makes no sense. You can’t have a commander-in-chief, President of the United States, that treats our friends like garbage, and our allies like – and uh – our enemies like friends.

Listen to the clip:

It seems fairly clear where Mandel’s attack on Obama regarding Israel comes from. The Republicans have been trying their best to get the Obama-hates-Israel meme to stick, but the facts repeatedly stand in the way of that. Even top Israeli officials regularly debunk these claims. The baseless GOP claims on Obama and Israel led the Associated Press to get involved. An AP “fact check” notes that Republican attacks on Obama that he’s not sufficiently pro-Israel “have strayed well beyond reality.”

But it’s completely unclear where Mandel got this idea that Obama has been treating England, Honduras, or Colombia “like garbage.” He seems to have just randomly picked these countries out of thin air. In fact, British Prime Minister David Cameron just visited Washington and as the Guardian put it, “Obama rolled out the red carpet, literally and politically.” (HT: American Bridge)