WHEREVER ONE looks these days, crises, conflicts and chaos seem to rule. From Tripoli to Tokyo, from Kiev to Caracas, the pace of violence appears to be accelerating. “Looking back over my more than half a century in intelligence,” the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, testified earlier this year, “I have not experienced a time when we’ve been beset by more crises and threats around the globe. My list is long.” How ironic, then, that national-security issues should dominate the headlines during President Obama’s second term, given how little time was devoted to a serious or sustained discussion of these subjects during the 2012 presidential race.

I advised Governor Mitt Romney on national-security issues beginning in 2005, traveling with him to Asia, the Middle East and Europe, drafting policy memos and organizing briefings during both the 2008 and 2012 campaigns. Naturally, I thought that foreign policy should have been far more prominently discussed during the 2012 race, and knew that Romney had a genuine interest in these issues—he had read widely, met with numerous foreign leaders, and acquired a sophisticated understanding of international trade and financial markets. I also thought, as did all of the other foreign-policy experts on the campaign, that Obama was vulnerable to criticism of his conduct of American foreign policy.

There was no shortage of policies to criticize. Obama entered office with an ambitious agenda to negotiate a climate-change treaty, accelerate the Middle East peace process, reach out to the mullahs in Iran and our other adversaries, embrace global nuclear zero and “reset” relations with Russia; he ran aground on all counts. He distanced himself from our traditional allies, dramatically cut defense spending, and failed to promote trade agreements that would generate jobs and create prosperity. He failed to recognize and seize the historic potential of the Arab Spring and, more generally, failed to speak out forcefully for human rights and individual freedom at a time when many people around the world were yearning for America’s support. He placed an inordinate faith in international institutions to maintain world order; he placed far less faith in America as an exceptional country that can and should shape world events.

SO WHY did my candidate, with one large exception, tend to downplay foreign policy on the campaign trail? And what lessons does this treatment of foreign policy in the 2012 campaign hold for the GOP and for the Republican nominee in 2016?

Needless to say, campaigns are not run by foreign-policy experts; they are run by political professionals. The Romney political brain trust made four early assumptions that shaped the rhythm, contours and focus of the campaign.

First, they reasoned correctly that Obama was most vulnerable on the economy. The country was slow to recover from the 2008 recession, homes were being foreclosed and unemployment remained stubbornly high. Any day not criticizing the president over the economy, they believed, was a day wasted. And economic success was Romney’s sweet spot. His track record of growing companies and creating jobs in the private sector gave him credibility on this subject that the president could not match.

Second, eight years of President George W. Bush and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cast a long shadow. Many members of the Romney foreign-policy team were veterans of the George W. Bush years, and we worried that the Obama campaign would try to spin any foreign-policy position or pronouncement as a warmed-over version of “failed” Bush policies. Or worse, that the Obama team would portray the Romney campaign as having been infiltrated by unrepentant “neocons” eager to launch new wars around the world. (Sadly, the media often abetted this effort; many journalists indiscriminately used the term “neocon” without understanding what it meant.) Any mention of foreign policy, especially as it related to the Middle East, always risked diverting attention from a sober discussion of the administration’s shortcomings and forcing the Romney campaign to relitigate the Iraq War.

Third, the residue of these two wars, coupled with the lingering effects of the recession, produced an electorate that did not care very much about foreign policy; in fact, polls showed that the American people were “fatigued” from these conflicts and preferred to focus on domestic issues or, in the president’s words, “nation building here at home.”

Fourth, at times during 2011 and 2012, it seemed as if the foreign-policy differences within the Republican Party were larger than our differences with the Democrats. The challenge for the Romney campaign’s stewards was to assemble as big a “tent” as possible, bridging the divide from libertarians who wanted a more restrained U.S. role in the world to internationalists who wanted a more active leadership role, and including social conservatives, business conservatives, evangelicals, free traders and Tea Partiers. Too much specificity could risk driving away key voters in the battleground states.

Combined with all these factors was a more traditional one: the fact that few career campaign officials have much experience in foreign policy. It is always easier for them to play to their strengths, such as raising money, securing the base, identifying hot-button wedge issues to attract new voters, and generally focusing on bread-and-butter issues closer to the hearts of the electorate. The candidate is thus advised to do the same. 2012 fit this pattern exactly.

THIS APPROACH was certainly reasonable under the circumstances. Whether Romney would have won in November 2012 had he been more outspoken on foreign-policy issues is uncertain, at best. But the next race for the White House is likely to be far different from the last one. Foreign-policy and national-security issues will play a more prominent role than they did four years earlier, for two reasons.

First, the world is a dangerous place and is likely to become more so in the next few years. The Obama administration’s second-term foreign-policy team has yet to demonstrate much competence in either anticipating crises or managing them diplomatically once they occur. The White House has been long on rhetorical flourishes and short on providing the resources to underwrite its policies; it has repeatedly willed the ends without providing the means. Relations with China have become contentious, and relations with Russia have become hostile. At the same time, our ties with friends and allies have deteriorated. Terrorism has continued unabated. Indeed, as Senator Dianne Feinstein, the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, commented during a hearing earlier this year, “Terrorism is at an all-time high worldwide.” With more than two years left in office, President Obama often seems diffident and hesitant, apparently resigned to accepting that there is little the United States can do to influence events. The fires will continue to burn.

Americans have seen this movie before. The Jimmy Carter years were distinguished by defense cuts, the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan, attacks on U.S. embassies and our diplomats being held hostage. When seeking the presidency in 1980, Ronald Reagan famously asked the American people a week before the election, “Are you better off than you were four years ago? . . . Is America as respected throughout the world as it was? Do you feel that our security is as safe, that we’re as strong as we were four years ago?” His questions crystallized Americans’ widespread dissatisfaction with the direction of the country and broke open a close race. Democrats in 2016 will be as vulnerable to this line of attack as they were under Jimmy Carter.

Second, it is likely that Hillary Clinton will be the standard-bearer for the Democrats and that she will point to her record as secretary of state as a prominent part of her case for why she ought to be elected president. Her recent interview in the Atlantic suggests she understands that she will be running as someone joined at the hip to Obama’s failed foreign policies. But while she may criticize the lack of a strategic vision in his “don’t do stupid stuff” approach, she will still have to defend her own “smart power” slogan as something more than a bumper sticker, as well as the fact that her actual accomplishments during her four years as chief diplomat were thin. Nonetheless, she will tout her expertise and attempt to portray her globe hopping as essential to restoring America’s reputation. She will also challenge her Republican opponents to match her knowledge about foreign policy, seeking to portray them as unfit to handle a foreign-policy emergency when the phone rings at 3:00 a.m. (as she did with then senator Obama in 2008).

IF THE Republicans win back control of the Senate in the November elections, there will be a fine opportunity for the party to lead and shape a national conversation on foreign policy. Three respected senators—John McCain, Bob Corker and Dan Coats—are likely to assume leadership roles on the key national-security committees: Armed Services, Foreign Relations and Intelligence, respectively.

The objective here should be to use this victory to set a foreign-policy agenda that does more than just highlight the shortcomings of the Obama years, as tempting as that will be. A GOP majority in the Senate should also be used to identify those issues of traditional Republican strength and road test new ideas. This would ideally lead to a set of foreign-policy objectives that the party could tee up for the 2016 campaign.

What would that agenda look like? A short list should include hearings on the Obama defense budget and the impact of the sequester on American forces; energy security; the war on terror; trade; human rights and democracy promotion; and the future of our relationships with China and Russia.

There are precedents for this type of strategic, deliberative exercise. In 1966, Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas held televised hearings on Vietnam that won national attention and influenced his party’s opposition to the war. In the 1980s, Congressman Les Aspin of Wisconsin sponsored wide-ranging seminars on defense planning and budgeting that helped move the Democratic Party’s policies on these issues toward the political center.

Properly structured, a series of Senate hearings would attract national media attention, help rebuild the credibility of Republicans to tackle important foreign-policy issues, and show voters that the party does not reflexively oppose the Obama administration, but has its own, better vision. New ideas would help frame the coming debate and set a new, more forward-looking agenda. They would help inoculate Republicans from Democratic attempts to revisit the Bush years, misbrand the party and marginalize any candidate who discusses national security.

Senate Republicans should also consider identifying issues that can win bipartisan support to demonstrate to a jaded public that the Republicans offer a better pathway for governing should they win the White House in 2016. One low-cost area would be to fast-track confirmation votes for State and Defense Department nominees. If individuals are incompetent, then of course they should be voted down; otherwise, it is simply good policy to get people in positions so they can do their jobs. It is also good politics, as it lays down a marker that can be cashed when the next Republican president submits his or her own nominees.

To be sure, there are dangers with this reframing. It is no secret that there are still serious foreign-policy differences within the Republican Party; exposing these fissures to the public may backfire. More importantly, polling data show that the American people do not really care about these issues. An April NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found that almost half of all Americans thought the United States should be less active in world affairs, versus 19 percent who said we should be more active. A mid-July poll similarly showed that almost two-thirds of the American people said that the nation’s biggest challenges are domestic ones. Focusing on foreign policy may suggest to voters that Republicans are out of touch with their everyday concerns and needs.

Yet Republicans should not shy away from foreign policy. If differences exist among the potential candidates, it is far better to have this debate in 2015 than to leave it unresolved and fought over during an election year.

Although it has become conventional wisdom that the American people are fatigued after two long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is difficult to understand why they should be so tired, since they have been asked to sacrifice so little. Only service members and their families have paid the full price for our foreign interventions. It may be more accurate to say that the American people are simply mistrustful of their leaders in Washington. They are skeptical that officials in either the executive or legislative branch can exercise good judgment, make smart decisions and competently execute them. They lack confidence that Washington knows what it is doing.

Polling data support this interpretation. President Obama has given the American people what one pundit described to me as a “Jenny Craig” foreign policy: lower defense spending, fewer international commitments and less support for human rights. Yet it appears that this approach has left a sour taste; polls also show that the American people have not rewarded the president with high marks for his stewardship of foreign affairs.

Further, it should be possible for Republicans to explain to the voters that many of these foreign-policy issues are not so “foreign” after all; many have significant domestic implications and can be placed in the broader context of personal and family security. For example, deep military cuts have led to layoffs in the defense industry. The president’s slow rolling of the Keystone pipeline decision has undermined U.S. energy security and cost American jobs. Foreign jihadists gathering in Syria and Iraq directly threaten the American homeland, according to the Obama administration’s own counterterrorism officials. The president’s lack of an aggressive trade agenda has stifled job creation at home. China’s theft of intellectual property hurts American business competitiveness. Framing the issues this way can help the Republicans better connect with the voters as well as begin to stake out a coherent view of the world and America’s role in it for the 2016 campaign.

IT IS important to communicate a positive vision for what a Republican administration would want to accomplish in the world. No one wins the White House by only playing defense. As Winston Churchill, a man who knew a few things about winning and losing elections, once remarked, “It is no good going to the country solely on the platform of your opponents’ mistakes.”

Churchill would also have agreed that it is essential to avoid making mistakes of your own. In past presidential campaigns, a foreign-policy crisis has often erupted that has tested the Republican nominee. Should that time come in 2016, it will advantage the nominee greatly if he or she has already spoken fluently and with authority about his or her vision for the country.

A more sustained focus on world affairs might have prevented the Romney campaign from committing one of its most serious errors: the mishandling of the Benghazi tragedy, when four American officials, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, were murdered by Islamic terrorists. In the pressure cooker of a tight race, the Romney campaign initially rushed to judgment before the situation was clear and many of the facts were known.

The Romney campaign’s misstep was seized upon and intensely scrutinized, while the media overlooked the larger story, which was that the Benghazi attack was one of four assaults by Al Qaeda affiliates on American embassies and consulates across North Africa, the Middle East and the Horn of Africa that day. These attacks not only undermined the president’s major claim to being a competent steward of U.S. national security—that he was winning the war on terror and that Al Qaeda was in retreat—but they also challenged his argument that the United States could reduce its international commitments without any harmful consequences.

The Benghazi tragedy provided a short-term political opening for Romney, but a rigorous examination of the president’s foreign-policy record never came to pass. The campaign was never able to place Benghazi within a larger foreign-policy critique of the Obama years. The narrative had not been adequately set in the minds of either the voters or the media that Obama’s handling of foreign policy was not the ringing success he claimed and that Romney had a better strategy for dealing with the threats facing the United States. More frustrating still was that Romney in fact had a set of core foreign-policy guidelines and principles (dating back to the 2008 election cycle and outlined in his 2010 book, No Apology: The Case for American Greatness), but did not talk much about them during the campaign (he gave a speech at the Citadel in October 2011 and one to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in July 2012). Would a more consistent and forceful articulation of his foreign-policy agenda have made a difference? I’d like to think so, but we’ll never know.

What we do know is that we are now in the second decade of the post-9/11 era, that national-security issues will continue to simmer and boil for the next two years, and that the country will be looking for the Republicans to offer better policies and real leadership. President Obama and his supporters may claim that he has avoided catastrophe, although more than 190,000 people have died in Syria’s civil war, the Islamic State has proclaimed a caliphate in Iraq and Syria, Iran’s centrifuges continue to spin, Russia has threatened the post–World War II stability of Europe, and China has aggressively asserted maritime and territorial claims that challenge America’s friends and allies in Asia, to mention just some of the more prominent foreign-policy setbacks that have occurred these past few years. The question Republicans need to be asking is: Can we do better? If we think we can, then we need to persuade the American people that they can once again entrust us with the stewardship of U.S. foreign policy.

Over two hundred years ago, Edmund Burke wrote, “No men could act with effect, who did not act in concert; that no men could act in concert, who did not act with confidence; that no men could act with confidence, who were not bound together by common opinions, common affections, and common interests.” This November, the GOP should tackle the job of developing common opinions, affections and interests in earnest.

Mitchell B. Reiss is the twenty-seventh president of Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland.

Image: Flickr/Geoff Livingston/CC by-sa 2.0