MITT ROMNEY unveiled his long-awaited foreign-policy speech on Monday, to more or less universal raspberries. Politico's Josh Gerstein runs down a roster of thumbs-down reviews from foreign-policy analysts of all stripes, including this one from James Lindsay of the Council on Foreign Relations: "He didn’t answer two key questions: what he would do differently and why we should expect what he would do to work." Steve Rosen of the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) takes Mr Romney to task for vacillating on whether the Arab spring should be seen as a democratic dawn or a radical Islamist threat. At the American ConservativeDaniel McCarthy blasts Mr Romney's George W. Bush-like bellicosity: "Nothing in this speech appeals to a war-weary and economically troubled people." "To the extent that Romney recited valid criticisms of Obama’s policies," writes Fred Kaplan in Slate, "he offered no alternatives. To the extent he spelled out specific steps he would take to deal with one problem or another, he merely recited actions that Obama has already taken."

The speech recapitulates the problems that were evident in Mr Romney's op-ed in the Wall Street Journal a week ago, which was slammed by the American Enterprise Institute's Danielle Pletka. ("We need 'a new strategy toward the Middle East.' Damn straight. What is it?") The danger Mr Romney invokes is anti-American feeling across the Arab world, summarised in the attack on the Benghazi consulate in Libya. The remedy, he thinks, is a foreign policy that...differs in no substantial way from that of Barack Obama. He even notes that the attack by terrorists on the consulate in Benghazi was followed by demonstrations by tens of thousands of Libyans, grateful for Mr Obama's decision to intervene in the Libyan civil war. So it's unclear what he's critiquing here.

But there are, I think, at least a couple of genuine areas of difference that Mr Romney outlines. The first is his nod towards a greater willingness to get heavy arms flowing to Syrian rebels, though he doesn't actually say he would provide them with such weapons directly, and he doesn't say how he plans to provide such arms only to those rebels who "share our values" (whoever those may be) and not to Islamist groups. (Perhaps we can find a "third force" of genuinely pro-democracy rebels! Cue "The Quiet American".) The second comes in this sequence:



Putting "daylight" between the United States and Israel is a reference to Mr Obama's efforts early in his administration to offer concrete opposition to Israeli settlement expansion on the West Bank, and to American refusal to back an Israeli strike on Iran to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons. These are the major issues on which American and Israeli policy diverge. Mr Romney is saying he thinks the main thing he'd do differently, in order to prevent things like the attack in Benghazi from happening, is to be a more aggressive backer of right-wing Israeli policy on Palestine and Iran.

So, what do you think? Would the American consulate in Benghazi have been less likely to be attacked if America had supported Israeli efforts to expand its settlements on the West Bank? How about if we had been more aggressive over the past two years in explicitly threatening to bomb Iran? Would America's standing in the Arab world be higher had we been more enthusiastically pro-Israel? It's a theory.

(Lexington has more on the speech. Photo credit: AFP)