Romney Uses ‘Cold War Prism,’ Biden Says in Foreign Policy Attack

Shifting the battle with Mitt Romney from jobs and taxes to the safer realm of foreign policy, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. traveled to New York City on Thursday to praise President Obama as the man who got Osama bin Laden and to paint Mr. Romney as a cold war relic who would leave American troops stranded in Afghanistan.

The president, Mr. Biden said in a speech at New York University, ended the war in Iraq, devised an exit strategy in Afghanistan and restored America’s moral stature. Mr. Romney, he asserted, has distorted that record and would drag the United States back to the go-it-alone policies of the Bush administration that culminated in the Iraq war.

“Governor Romney, I think, is counting on collective amnesia,” Mr. Biden said to a gathering of 500 that included law students and Democratic foreign-policy elders like Gen. Wesley Clark, the former NATO commander, who plans to campaign for Mr. Obama. But, he added, “Americans know we can’t go back to the future.”

In assailing Mr. Romney on Iran, Afghanistan and other issues, Mr. Biden was pressing what the campaign believes is an advantage in national security — unusual for a Democratic incumbent — over a Republican who has struggled to find an easy opening against Mr. Obama on foreign policy.

The Romney campaign fired back even before Mr. Biden spoke, fielding its own team of foreign-policy advisers who accused Mr. Obama of abdicating American leadership on Iran and Syria, downgrading the alliance with Israel, buckling to Russia on missile defense and hollowing out the military with cuts in the Pentagon budget.

Mr. Biden was offering a “fantasy narrative,” said Dan Senor, a Romney adviser who was a spokesman in Iraq during the Bush administration, in a conference call with reporters. The president, he said, had left allies and dissidents “exposed and isolated in a way I have not seen in American foreign-policy history for years.”

Still, it was the Romney team that seemed dated. Pierre Prosper, who was an ambassador handling war-crimes issues for President George W. Bush, accused Mr. Obama of appeasing Russia by abandoning plans to put a missile defense site in “Czechoslovakia” — a nation that has not existed since the early 1990s. John F. Lehman, a secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration, said the “Soviets” were capitalizing on Mr. Obama’s weakening of the American military.

Mr. Biden described Mr. Romney as someone who viewed the world “through a cold war prism,” borrowing the thought from Russia’s president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, who said Mr. Romney’s description of Russia as the nation’s “No. 1 geopolitical foe” was 1970s thinking.

It was a rare day of geopolitical combat in a campaign that has been fixated on kitchen-table concerns. But the back-and-forth had a familiar feel, as the Romney camp matched Mr. Biden’s assertions that their candidate wanted to recycle discredited and outdated policies with claims that the president was presiding over an America in decline.

Mr. Biden, the former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has given five speeches in recent weeks designed to highlight the differences between the candidates, and Thursday’s event was a chance for him to return to his foreign-policy wheelhouse.

The vice president walked through the major national-security challenges of the Obama presidency, contending that where Mr. Romney disagreed with the president, his positions were prone to reversals, and where his views did not differ from the president’s — as on Iran, Mr. Biden argued — Mr. Romney distorted the facts.

Saying that the president and Mr. Romney have both called for crippling sanctions on Iran, backed up by a threat to use military force, to prevent Tehran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, Mr. Biden said, “It’s hard for me to understand what the governor means by a very different policy” — unless, he added, it means going to war.

“If that’s what Governor Romney means by a very different policy,” Mr. Biden said, “he should tell the American people.”

Mr. Obama, by contrast, followed Theodore Roosevelt’s dictum to “speak softly and carry a big stick,” Mr. Biden said. “I promise you, the president has a big stick,” he added, “I promise you.”

The vice president pressed his point further, recounting the story of Mr. Obama’s decision to order a raid on Bin Laden’s hide-out in Pakistan and speculating about whether Mr. Romney would have done the same. He quoted Mr. Romney as saying on the campaign trail in 2008, “It’s not worth moving heaven and earth, spending billions of dollars, just to catch one person.”

“If you’re looking for a bumper sticker to sum up how President Obama has handled what we inherited, it’s pretty simple, ‘Osama bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive,’ ” Mr. Biden said. Had Mr. Romney been in office, he mused, that slogan could be reversed.

The Romney campaign did outline some clear differences with the Obama administration. Mr. Senor said Mr. Romney would provide arms to opposition groups in Syria, something the president has resisted.

Mr. Romney’s advisers also said the governor would never have announced a deadline for withdrawing troops from Afghanistan. Mr. Romney has previously said he wants to withdraw troops as soon as “our generals” agree, but he has also publicly endorsed the NATO timetable for turning security over to the Afghans by 2014.