Syrian view will show Romney's instincts Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney Ever since he launched bid to be president, Mitt Romney has tried to cast the incumbent as "weak" on foreign policy. His favourite topic has been Iran and he likes to promise that only he can stop Tehran getting a nuclear bomb. He also accused Barack Obama of being too cosy with Russia - "without question, our number one geopolitical foe." As Syria has sunk towards civil war , Mr Romney has started to flirt with turning the crisis into a general election issue. In one of his few comments on the conflict, he tried, in effect, to blame the Obama administration for the continued carnage in Syria. "President Obama's lack of leadership has resulted in a policy of paralysis that has watched Assad slaughter 10,000 individuals," he said. The US should work with other countries to arm the opposition, he added. Mr Romney's attempt to wade into the Syria debate raises two questions. Is political opinion in the US starting to favour intervention? And what do his words tell us about the foreign policy instincts of a man who could be entering the White House six months from now? As information about the Houla massacre has flooded in, public pressure on European governments does appear to be mounting, even if the politicians dislike most of the available options. "We are not far away from a Srebrenica," says one European official, referring to the massacre in Bosnia that made Nato intervention inevitable. Yet the US still seems a long way from that point. It is not just that the public and the military are tired after more than a decade at war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The bottom line for Mr Romney is that even his own party is divided over what to do in Syria. For some months, the Republican senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham have been making the case for a Nato air campaign against the regime of Bashar al-Assad, to protect the opposition. Yet many prominent Republicans are opposed. Mike Rogers, chair of the House intelligence committee, worries that the opposition harbours Islamist radicals. "We know that al-Qaeda has been attempting to infiltrate," he said last week. I'm not sure arming is the right answer here, mainly because ... you don't know who you're giving weapons to. On the foreign policy instincts of a President Romney, there are two sharply different views. More moderate Republicans fear Mr Romney is too in thrall to the neoconservative ideas that dominated the first term of the George W. Bush administration. There have been mutterings about how few of the party's foreign policy grandees have yet to endorse his campaign publicly and about the apparent influence of John Bolton, the hawkish former ambassador to the UN. Realist Republicans dislike his campaign rhetoric about China and have criticised his comments on Russia. Many of these observers view US intervention in a Syrian civil war as complete folly and are watching Mr Romney's position closely. Yet some of the European allies who took part in the Libya operation last year have other worries. Rather than seeing Mr Romney as a gung-ho neoconservative, they fear that his foreign policy views betray the sort of opportunism that domestic critics see on issues such as abortion. When Mr Obama did finally decide to back European calls for military action in Libya, Mr Romney attacked him for being so slow. The US should be the "leader," he said, rather than following France or "delegating" to the UN. Yet when the operation encountered problems over the first two months, Mr Romney shifted tack and accused the president of "mission creep and mission muddle." As one European official put it: "On Libya, he really was all over the place." The Syrian crisis is so complicated that it has not yet given Mr Romney much space to attack his political opponent. But amid the caricatures of flip-flopper and neocon, Syria will help shed light on where Mr Romney's instincts really lie.