Romney turns to advisers to build foreign policy

In addition to Reiss and Healey, Romney’s core sounding board has generally consisted of Jim Talent, a former senator from Missouri; Dan Senor, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations; and Cofer Black, former director of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center.

In certain instances, the team reaches out to others, such as Meghan O’Sullivan, a former Bush administration deputy national security adviser on Iraq and Afghanistan; Walid Phares, a Lebanese-born professor at National Defense University; or Bill Martel, a professor at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

“It’s a fairly centrist group,’’ said Michael O’Hanlon, a foreign affairs specialist at the Brookings Institution. “It’s not a big neocon group. It’s pragmatic and realist.’’

Romney’s foreign policy team called O’Hanlon in 2007, after he co-wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times that advocated sustaining the Iraq mission. Romney was the only candidate in either party to ask to meet with him.

“I was impressed in that meeting with the group dynamics,’’ O’Hanlon, a Democrat who voted for President Obama, said of Romney’s core team. “They seem to have collegiality and respect for him without being afraid to raise interesting questions or their own points of view in front of him.’’

Romney’s aides are still compiling a formal list of advisers.

“We will announce our foreign policy team later in the year,’’ said Eric Fehrnstrom, a senior Romney adviser. “There will be some familiar faces, but also some new ones.’’

The issue of Afghanistan could be divisive among the GOP field. There has been a growing division within the Republican Party over the direction not only of the war effort but over what role the United States should play in international conflicts.

After President Obama recommended troop withdrawals, Romney criticized the decision.