By TRIP GABRIEL
Published: December 14, 2011
Should Newt Gingrich become president, his foreign policy vision might remind many people of the cold war. But this time the threat would be from a nuclear-armed Iran rather than the Soviet Union.
Joseph Sywenkyj for The New York Times
Newt Gingrich spoke at a town hall meeting in Windham, N.H., on Monday.
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REPUBLICAN DEBATE
When:
Thursday at 9 p.m. Eastern time
Where:
Sioux City Convention Center in Sioux City, Iowa
Mr. Gingrich, who is fond of big overarching ideas, has yet to give a major foreign policy speech, but he has staked out positions while campaigning that suggest a nascent Gingrich Doctrine, one that looks to decades of struggle against radical Islam.
Even as President Obama winds down American commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mr. Gingrich is warning of a protracted ideological struggle — and perhaps military intervention in Iran — as part of a battle of ideas in the Muslim world.
And just as during the cold war, Mr. Gingrich frames the challenges in stark terms that can have an apocalyptic ring, as when he described Palestinians as an “invented” people whose leadership seeks the destruction of Israel.
The fierceness of Mr. Gingrich’s language, which has struck a chord with the Republican rank and file and fueled his rise to the top of the polls, also raises questions about the temperament he would bring to the White House when dealing with allies and adversaries.
Mitt Romney, contrasting his own disposition as one of “sobriety, care, stability,” accused Mr. Gingrich recently of being “a bomb-thrower,” rhetorically and perhaps literally, and in an interview Wednesday with The New York Times he sharpened that criticism, saying, “Zany is not what we need in a president.”
Those remarks echo the critiques of Barry Goldwater, the 1964 Republican presidential candidate, that portrayed him as an unstable finger on the nuclear button.
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