The neocons are back vying for a seat in the White House

That Edward Luce in that radical left wing rag The Financial Times on Mitt Romney bringing us more of Bush II on the Foreign Policy front:

Whether it is on Iran, which he will prevent from getting a nuclear weapon (“period”), or China, which on his first day in office he will brand a currency manipulator, he seems comfortable tossing out the red meat. While many social and even fiscal conservatives withhold trust in Mr Romney’s authenticity, most neoconservatives have been with him all along.

Even the “paleocons” warmed to Mr Romney. At the start of the year John Bolton, the fire and brimstone former US ambassador to the UN, endorsed Mr Romney even though Newt Gingrich promised to make him his secretary of state. Foreign policy hardliners do not seem to doubt Mr Romney’s credentials. And he does not seem to doubt theirs.

Few on the Romney list of advisers could be described as belonging to the James Baker school of diplomacy, which used to be described as “realist” and which once dominated the Republican world view. That space is now occupied by Barack Obama. Mr Romney’s advisory team is less diverse than George W. Bush’s group of “vulcans”, which included realists such as Condoleezza Rice, Robert Zoellick and Robert Blackwill.

Among its leading lights is Richard Williamson, a former Bush official, who last week said Mr Obama’s “Mother, may I?” approach to Iran and China would end under Romney. Then there is Dan Senor, Mr Bush’s ever-bullish spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. On national security there is Cofer Black, the former CIA counter-terrorism chief and senior executive at Blackwater, the private security group that so besmirched itself it changed its name to Xe.

Mr Romney’s Europe team is headed by Nile Gardiner, who helped Lady Thatcher write her memoirs and is now at the Heritage Foundation from where he denounces Mr Obama’s “humiliation” of Britain. One of Mr Romney’s top three advisers on the Middle East and north Africa is Walid Phares, an American from Lebanon, who trained Maronite Christian militants during that country’s strife-torn 1980s. And so on.

On paper, therefore, and on the hustings, the case looks open and shut: Mr Romney is a hardliner with an instinct for unilateralism.