Republican candidates define a world view different from Bush

Last week, after Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee criticised the Bush administration for an “arrogant bunker mentality...

Last week, after Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee criticised the Bush administration for an “arrogant bunker mentality” toward the world, rival Mitt Romney rose to George W Bush’s defence. “Mike Huckabee owes the president an apology,” Romney said. But Romney too has criticised the Bush administration, saying the occupation of Iraq was “under-planned, understaffed (and) under-managed,” resulting in “a mess”.

Other GOP candidates have found things to dislike in Bush’s foreign policy, too: Rudolph W Giuliani has dismissed the president’s campaign for democracy in the Muslim world as naive and opposed his drive to establish a Palestinian state.

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John McCain thinks Bush hasn’t sent enough troops to Iraq and has been too easy on Russian President Vladimir Putin. One by one, the Republican candidates have been sketching out the lines of a post-Bush foreign policy. Their prescriptions are not identical, and they have been careful to avoid antagonising Bush loyalists in the GOP base.

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But all four have edged away from the most ambitious part of Bush’s worldview — the idea that the main goal of US foreign policy should be spreading democracy overseas. “Republicans are drifting back to a less-exuberant position on global intervention — for obvious reasons,” said Peter Rodman, a former Bush administration official who supports McCain.

“They’re saying: ‘I’m for all the things in the Bush policy that you liked and that worked — and as for the other things, I’ll do those differently,’” said Michael Mandelbaum, a foreign policy scholar at John Hopkins University. “It’s a very tricky task. They want to put some distance between themselves and the president because he isn’t very popular. But he is popular among the Republican electorate that they are appealing to now, in the primary campaign,” Mandelbaum said. “It’s like walking between raindrops.” All of the leading GOP candidates support the most visible planks of Bush’s foreign policy: continuing the war in Iraq, tightening sanctions on Iran and pursuing terrorists in every corner of the globe.But all have said that — at least in tone and style — they would approach the world differently from how the incumbent leader of their party does. Romney and Huckabee have said they would put more emphasis on diplomacy; Giuliani and McCain would be more tough-minded. The candidates rarely invoke the president’s name on the campaign trail, let alone echo his 2005 declaration that the “ultimate goal” of American diplomacy is “ending tyranny in our world”. “Democracy promotion was uniquely Bush’s contribution (to foreign policy), and they’ve backed off it,” said Mandelbaum, author of the book Democracy’s Good Name.