Foreign+Policy

Do the candidates hope to improve relationships with aggressive and neutral countries? - Matthew Wayland** What is your position on Iran and their nuclear program? Nick McComb If you are elected, how will you deal with Russia? Do you think they are trying to rebuild the Soviet Union? - a sixth grader
 * QUESTIONS

Good youtubes: Iran http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDTG1PiED58&feature=related Russia http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7LilHUdRIM&feature=related

Alex and WIll Loomis

Issue Overview: Foreign policy http://origin.barackobama.com/issues/foreign_policy/

//McCain Position:McCain voted in favor of the Iraq war, and he says the U.S. may need to [|increase the number of troops there]. He has supported almost all of President Bush's "War on Terror" bills. McCain would [|maintain the embargo] on Cuba. He has called for strong action(including a NATO-enforced "no fly" zone) to [|end genocide in Darfur]. Global climate change is seen by some as [|McCain's "signature issue"]. [|Citizens for Global Solutions gave McCain a F]// rating on foreign policy positions.

The third McCain speech was delivered on Wednesday. It is as personal, nuanced and ambitious a speech as any made by a presidential candidate this year. McCain noted that we are not only fighting a war on terror. The world is seeing a growing split between liberal democracies and growing autocracies. We are seeing a world in which great power rivalries - with China, Russia and Iran - have to be managed and soothed. Moreover, the United States is not the sole hegemon. Power is widely distributed among many rising nations. McCain's core purpose in the speech was to revive the foreign policy tradition that has jumped parties but that has been associated with people like Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Stimson, Dean Acheson, John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. In this tradition, a strong America is the key to world peace, but America's role is as a leading player in an international system. America didn't defeat communism, McCain said Wednesday, the American-led global community did. This is the tradition that Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment has been describing for a decade. McCain offered to build new pillars for that system - a League of Democracies, a new nuclear nonproliferation regime and a successor to the Kyoto treaty. In stabilizing Asia and the Middle East, he would rely more on democracies like Turkey, India, Israel and Iraq, and less on Mubarak and Musharraf. Unlike the realists, McCain believes other nations have to be judged according to how they treat their own citizens. Unlike the Bush administration in its first few years, he believes global treaties cannot solely be evaluated according to a narrow definition of the American interest. The United States also has to protect the fabric of the international system. McCain opened his speech with a description of his father leaving home on the day of Pearl Harbor, and then being gone for much of the next four years. He harkened back repeatedly to the accomplishments of the Truman administration. In so doing, he signaled that the foreign policy debate of the coming months will be very different from the one of the past six years. Anybody who thinks McCain is merely continuing the Bush agenda is not paying attention.


 * This is a very good summary. Basically, McCain is pro Iraq, and says we should increase troops there. Also, he agrees on the war on terror bills. He also wants to create a no fly zone.**

Obama Position: Senator Obama opposed the war in Iraq. He advocates a regional conference involving Syria and Iran as one part of an [|ultimate Iraq solution]. He partnered with GOP Senator Richard Lugar in efforts to [|fight proliferation of nuclear weapons]. Obama has also spoken out on the [|importance of energy independence] and the need for U.S. leadership in dealing with global climate change. He seeks [|significant changes] in U.S.-Cuba policy. [|Citizens for Global Solutions gave Obama an A+] rating on his foreign policy positions. An adept politician, Obama began emphasizing his "anti-war" stance as the war became increasingly unpopular among Democrats across the country and he began gearing up for the 2008 presidential campaign. Gone was the 2004 equivocating. He had found an issue with which to distinguish himself from Clinton, Edwards, and Biden. Campaigning among grassroots Democrats, Obama sounds like Cindy Sheehan, but his real, far more nuanced views have been laid out for members of the elite Chicago Council on Global Affairs. In November 2006, he telegraphed his "safe" imperial mindset to the powers that be when he said, "There is one other place where our mistakes in Iraq have cost us dearly--and that is the loss of our government's credibility with the American people. According to a Pew survey, 42% of Americans now agree with the statement that the U.S. should 'mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own.' We cannot afford to be a country of isolationists right now. 9/11 showed us that try as we might to ignore the rest of the world, our enemies will no longer ignore us. And so we need to maintain a strong foreign policy, relentless in pursuing our enemies and hopeful in promoting our values around the world." al and will l.