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.
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.
But critics said the cold war analogy was simplistic. Daniel W. Drezner, a professor of international politics at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, said that in the last Republican debate, Mr. Gingrich hyperbolically overstated the threat from Iran, which has yet to acquire a nuclear weapon, by using the phrase “if we do survive” in discussing Iran’s intentions.
“The Soviet Union was a much more powerful and bigger existential threat to the U.S. than anything the Middle East can muster now,” Dr. Drezner said. “I would describe this as classic shallow Big Think.”
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