Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have a problem criticizing Barack Obama’s foreign policy: Even after nearly four years, the president has no definable foreign policy. The Obama administration has, instead, only a mishmash idea that a declining America must “lead from behind” and accept a more passive role in world affairs — a notion reflective of America’s rising indebtedness, inevitable defense cuts, and uncertainty over the morality of its international involvements, past and present. (President Obama not only apprehends this situation correctly but also bears some of the blame for it: He has added $5 trillion to the national debt, has slashed new oil-and-gas production on federal lands, is willing to accept almost $1 trillion in projected defense cuts over the next decade, and has been apologetic abroad for supposed American sins.)

The result is a sort of make-it-up-as-we-go-along reactiveness, as the administration goes into panic over each new crisis. Is America still in reset mode with Vladimir Putin, or finally repelled by his knee-jerk anti-Americanism and crackdown on human rights? Were the once-reviled Bush-Cheney anti-terrorism protocols — such as Guantanamo Bay, renditions, military tribunals, drones, and preventative detention — necessary after all, but only with politically correct packaging such as the phrase “overseas contingency operations,” the attempt to put 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on trial in a civilian court, and outreach to the elite of the Muslim Brotherhood as they seek to assume power in the Middle East?

Are we cutting back to between 300 and 500 deployable nuclear weapons, or just posturing about it in Nobel Peace–laureate fashion — and does it matter to us that Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan might choose to go nuclear, to ensure their own security, if we reduce our arsenal? When nearly 1 million protesters hit the streets of Tehran during the spring of 2009, why did the administration fail to support them, breaking its silence only for occasional acknowledgments of long-ago American transgressions? Were the dissidents written off as provocateurs who might spoil the new president’s deft multicultural skills in winning over Ali Khamenei and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?

How can imploring the United Nations and the Arab League — but not the U.S. Congress — for approval to intervene in Libya, or boasting about a U.N. resolution for humanitarian aid while subverting it by bombing, or bragging about our leadership while “leading from behind,” become a model for Syria, or, in fact, for anything at all?

The challenge for Mitt Romney is to restore some sense of American leadership after this nonsense. A first step would be to reassure traditional allies — Western Europe, Japan, South Korea, and Israel, to start — that they are exceptional friends, given their humane democracies and past loyalty. They certainly deserve singular American attention in a way that Vladimir Putin, the Castro brothers, and Hugo Chávez do not. Rather than alternately praising and damning China and Russia, depending on the incident of the week, the next administration should talk softly to both while carrying a far bigger stick to dissuade them from bullying Eastern Europe, Japan, and South Korea.

The Obama “pivot” to Asia was, fairly or not, judged inseparable from a drawdown in Europe. But as the euro zone unravels and continental animus against Germany evokes earlier, far scarier events, now is not the time to disengage from that continent. Loudly redirecting military resources to the Pacific while contemplating vast defense cuts recalls a weak, Depression-era America’s lecturing imperial Japan in early 1940 on good behavior even as, with great fanfare, it redeployed a few aging battleships from the West Coast to Pearl Harbor. Spreading shrinking military assets thin while broadcasting supposedly new strategies is a signal of weakness, pure and simple.

The Middle East has been changing radically, in ways that transcend the ongoing upheavals of the Arab Spring. Soon Israel may be a gas-and-oil exporter. Vast new finds of fossil fuels in the United States could, with proper policy decisions, make our country not only vastly richer but far less of a hostage to Middle East autocracies. The more we pump at home, the fewer dollars go to illiberal regimes and the less we find ourselves berating others, in passive-aggressive fashion, about various sins that we tolerate quite easily among the Gulf sheikdoms. We could speak, internationally, with a clearer moral voice, if our own energy and financial houses were in order.

Our reaction to the Arab Spring has been comparable to the events of 1979, when we appeared weak to friends and allies by selling out the shah and weaker still to the Islamist enemies we slavishly courted. The Obama administration belatedly helped to oust Hosni Mubarak and Moammar Qaddafi, although both of these authoritarians were less of a threat than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the Arab Spring protest movements less liberal than the Iranian Green movement that we ignored in 2009. There is a democracy in the Middle East — in Iraq. But the administration seems willing to ignore completely what the blood and treasure of the U.S. military achieved in Baghdad, while investing hopes in the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo.

The problem with the present administration’s inaction on Syria is not that Obama has not yet bombed Damascus or sent in the Marines: After two wars and 8,000 dead Americans, there is no public support for optional interventions in the Middle East. It is, rather, that he has never spelled out a consistent policy of support for consensual government, one applicable equally to dictators and theocrats.

In that regard, it is mistaken to consider Obama a naïve idealist — especially given the foolish compliments that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other Democratic congressional leaders lavished on Bashar al-Assad, and the readiness with which the administration restored diplomatic relations with Damascus. Instead, he is an inept opportunist, quite ready to abandon principle in foreign policy if he thinks there are domestic political rewards or believes he can score points with illiberal poseurs such as newly elected Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi, who may share Obama’s skepticism of the American-fostered postwar global order but is unambiguous about his desire for the U.S. to release the mastermind of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center.

In an eyeblink, an unhinged Qaddafi went from being a Westernizing monster-in-rehab to being a monster, period, and Bashar al-Assad from being the focus of a Vogue puff piece to being a veritable Hitlerite — all predicated not on principled support for consensual government, but on whether once-feeble protest movements had grown to the point of overthrowing the dictator in question.

The administration’s insecurity about its aims and methods was never better illustrated than in the politically motivated serial leaks that damaged our national security. When Obama officials passed to pet reporters in Washington and New York key details about the hit on Osama bin Laden, the double-agent bomber in Yemen, the cyber war against Iran, and the operational protocols of the drone assassination program, the concern of both the administration and the media was to get the narrative out to swing-state voters about the underappreciated but heroic role of Barack Obama in dealing with our worst enemies.

Where does all this leave Mitt Romney in articulating a new foreign policy? The corrective for the last four years should rest on a few simple principles that received bipartisan support for nearly the last 70 years but were mostly abrogated in 2009. First, U.S. defense hinges on a sound economy, and defense expenditure equal to at least 4 percent of annual GDP. A massive new effort to exploit domestic gas-and-oil reserves should help ensure both. This is the only way the U.S. will be able to retain credibility, adequate deterrence, and a flexibility of options, especially in the Middle East.

Second, there has to be some understanding that a Japan deserves American deference in a way that a Venezuela does not; that a democratic India is preferable to an increasingly Islamist Pakistan; that moral lectures should be reserved for an immoral Hamas rather than a humane Israel; and that we are not neutral when it comes to an erratic Argentina baiting our oldest friend, Great Britain, over the Falkland Islands. The United States can be clear without being crude in quietly reminding nations that sharing our liberal-democratic values and interests brings dividends in a way that opposing them does not.

Third, major areas of the world are changing unpredictably as we speak. No one knows what will ultimately come of the Putin regime in Russia. China will probably not succeed in squaring the circle of implanting capitalism onto ossified Communism — but the consequences of that failure also remain unknown. There is some worry that ascendant anti-American Arab Spring theocrats will prove as fickle and odious as the now-deposed pro-American strongmen. An entire Latin American cadre of illiberal revolutionaries has been democratically elected in Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Peru, and Venezuela, most likely in perpetuity. Amid such a mess, what must be constant is American strength based on an unparalleled military and a consistent and principled foreign-policy preference for constitutional government and human rights.

Finally, Romney should continue to remind Americans why he has no apologies for our past and no doubts about our future. Such confidence would preclude the passive-aggressive demonization of Bush-era anti-terrorism protocols while embracing or expanding all of them. An administration confident in American values and its own adherence to them has no need to leak secrets about how it conducts covert operations, or to publicly trash its predecessor. Words and gestures matter: Each presidential bow, each apology, each public rebuke of the prior administration, each new mythography about the unheralded contributions of the Islamic world magnifies the image of an insecure, insolvent, and militarily unsure United States.

Fiscal prudence, energy development, military preparedness, support for allies and vigilance toward enemies, as much discretion about our intelligence successes as about our failures, and principled advocacy of human rights and representative government — all that should be noncontroversial. That it now sounds radical is a sad commentary on the failures of the present administration.

– Mr. Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The End of Sparta.