As former national-security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski told me at the time, “After victory in the Cold War, a number of ‘grand visions’ competed conceptually for preeminence in the United States, and one of them was the neoconservative vision. President Bush adopted their worldview.”

This worldview yielded a costly and unpopular preventive war in Iraq, the spread of anti-Americanism worldwide and a pronounced decline of trust in the quality of U.S. leadership. For perhaps the first time in the modern era, even close U.S. allies came to distrust American motives. The eventual result was that top neoconservatives and hard-liners who stoked the ideological fires and steered foreign policy in the first Bush term, winning the president to their cause in the process, were shown the door during his second term (including Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, Scooter Libby and Donald Rumsfeld).

The second Bush term was driven by the more cautious and moderate vision of Republican realists and liberal internationalists, most notably Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. They attempted to mend ties with bruised Western allies, engaged in negotiations even with “evil regimes” in North Korea and Iran, and reinserted the United States into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a mediator. This won the derision of neoconservatives. “What we’ve seen is a real wavering on the principles that were articulated throughout the first term, when Bush seemed to be a truly revolutionary figure,” Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank and intellectual home to many neoconservatives, told me at the time.

NOW MITT Romney must reconcile the tensions between these competing foreign-policy camps. That will require, first, the rendering of a verdict on the Bush years. The neoconservatives who dominated Bush’s first term, unrepentant about the Iraq War, continue to argue for greater American assertiveness against adversaries such as Iran and military support for democratic revolutions in places such as Libya and Syria. Tea Party hard-liners remain suspicious of entangling alliances, arms-control treaties and institutions of global governance such as the United Nations, while the evangelicals among them have a visceral connection to the Israeli Right.

“The ghost of the Cold War consensus that supported U.S. leadership of a global, commercial order has passed,” says Walter Russell Mead, “and that has created disarray in U.S. foreign policy in general and a civil war in the Republican Party in particular.” The GOP’s populist energy now comes from people who want the United States to stop being the world’s policeman and social worker, focusing instead on fixing what’s broken at home. Mead sees the party factions competing to enlist the Jacksonian tea partiers as foot soldiers in their particular causes. He adds:

My reading of the popular psychology is that the neoconservatives will win that competition by providing the foreign-policy strategy and political language that attracts very threat-sensitive Jacksonian populists. If I’m right, the Republican foreign policy that emerges from this election will favor global engagement, assertive interactions in the Middle East and a large military budget.

In other words, the tea partiers will back the neoconservative worldview that dominated the first Bush term. What is perhaps most notable about that shift, however, is the degree to which more moderate Republican realists and liberal internationalists feel increasingly marginalized in a party that continues to move markedly to the right.

Brent Scowcroft, a lifelong Republican who served in the Gerald Ford and Bush 41 presidencies, notes that there always have been strident people in American politics, but in the past there were a greater number willing to aim for cooperation and compromise. Now his party has embraced the Newt Gingrich approach of “rote opposition and ‘just say no,’” says Scowcroft, who calls this approach “grossly dysfunctional.” He adds, “That makes it very hard for any president to lead internationally.”

Romney’s task of articulating a Republican foreign-policy narrative is complicated also by Obama’s deftness in occupying the middle ground of liberal internationalism, most obviously evidenced by his decision to keep Robert Gates on as defense secretary. Thus, some of his foreign-policy initiatives in the realms of nonproliferation and Middle East peacemaking have been supported by moderate Republicans, including Scowcroft, George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell, Richard Lugar, Robert Gates and Chuck Hagel.

To draw clear distinctions with the Obama record, Romney has attacked the president from the Far Right while embracing Ronald Reagan’s “peace through strength” rhetoric. That explains both Romney’s endorsement of major increases in defense spending and the size of the military even as the nation ends two ground wars and his criticism of Obama as weak and conciliatory toward adversaries.

In Romney’s narrative, Obama’s outreach to the Islamic world and talk about past U.S. missteps—supporting autocrats in Muslim countries or adopting counterterrorism policies that ran “contrary to our ideals”—amounts to apologizing for America’s greatness. “Never before in American history has its president gone before so many foreign audiences to apologize for so many American misdeeds,” Romney wrote in his 2010 book, No Apology: The Case for American Greatness. “It is his way of signaling to foreign countries and foreign leaders that their dislike for America is something he understands and that is, at least in part, understandable.”

Romney has focused his most intense criticism at Obama’s pressure on Israel to end settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem as a way to bring Palestinians back to the negotiating table. Successive Democratic and Republican administrations going back decades have opposed settlements, but Romney argues that Obama’s approach amounts to “[throwing] Israel under the bus.” The clear message, driven home by Romney’s visit to Israel this summer in his sole overseas trip of the campaign, is that Romney would back Israel unconditionally and adopt the “hands-off” approach to the Middle East peace process that George W. Bush took in his first term.

Regarding great-power relations, Romney also has taken a hard line, criticizing the Obama administration’s “reset” in relations with Moscow and tolerance of China’s unfair trade practices. “Russia, this is, without question, our number one geopolitical foe. They fight every cause for the world’s worst actors,” Romney told CNN. And Romney has threatened to label Beijing a “currency manipulator” on his first day in office if the communist regime continues to refuse to float its currency against the dollar. “If you are not willing to stand up to China, you will get run over by China, and that’s what’s happened for twenty years,” Romney said.

Romney’s surrogates also criticize Obama’s attempts to build international consensus for action at the United Nations as multilateralism run amok, too often tying America’s hands. They accuse the administration of “leading from behind” in the NATO operation to oust Libya’s Muammar el-Qaddafi, belittle its willingness to negotiate with adversaries such as Syria and Iran, and deride its attempts to close the Guantánamo Bay prison as being soft on terrorism.

“Like Ronald Reagan, Governor Romney believes that America and the world are better off when the United States leads from a position of unchallenged strength, and that our values should animate our foreign policy,” former ambassador Richard Williamson, a foreign-policy adviser to Romney, said in an interview. “Contrast that to President Obama’s preference for ‘leading from behind,’ for engagement for engagement’s sake, and his undue deference to multilateralism that has compromised U.S. policies towards Syria, Iran and North Korea.”

Romney’s critique has a common theme: Obama’s outreach to global constituencies, and embrace of a multilateral worldview, represent a turning away from “American exceptionalism,” or the notion that the United States embodies a unique set of values, principles and attributes that make it a beacon of democracy and the natural global leader. “I believe we are an exceptional country with a unique destiny and role in the world,” Romney said at the Citadel last year. “Not exceptional, as the President has derisively said, in the way that the British think Great Britain is exceptional or the Greeks think Greece is exceptional. In Barack Obama’s profoundly mistaken view, there is nothing unique about the United States.” He adds, “If you do not want America to be the strongest nation on Earth, I am not your President. You have that President today.”

Of course, one danger of such a hard-line foreign-policy narrative is that it takes lessons from the Reagan era out of time and context. Reagan burdened the country with high levels of debt, for instance, to overwhelm the monolithic threat of the Soviet Union. That gamble paid off with the Soviet collapse. Today, by contrast, both the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and secretary of defense argue persuasively that the United States’ crippling debt is the number one national-security threat to the nation. Yet when Obama proposed creating a bipartisan deficit-reduction commission whose hard medicine would be guaranteed an up-or-down vote in Congress, a number of Republicans who had previously supported the idea changed positions to thwart the president, a clear indication that a post–Cold War consensus for addressing the nation’s most pressing problems remains elusive.

There also is a danger that the Romney narrative may remind voters less of Ronald Reagan than of George W. Bush, and it could lead to a repeat of Bush’s controversial first-term mistakes. Chief among them, in the view of some, was the failure to recognize some of the important implications of the current age of globalization, such as the erosion of national borders, empowerment of nonstate actors and political awakening of ordinary citizens around the world. These developments have created problems such as terrorism, the threat of proliferation and destabilizing revolutions that can be dealt with only through multilateral cooperation. As Scowcroft puts it, “The decision by the [Bush 43] administration to go in the opposite direction, and try and deal with those problems as a unilateral nation-state using traditional military power, is what brought America to the point of crisis.”

Image: Pullquote: To understand the foreign-policy narrative Mitt Romney is attempting to articulate, it’s important to grasp the threads of foreign-policy thought that he and the campaign are drawing on.Essay Types: Essay