The laughing about Governor Palin's recent interviews neglects the fact that she has some genuine foreign policy experience and how has that effected her tenure as Governor of Alaska. After all, Alaska is not a contiguous state.
Much has been made of Sarah Palin’s lack of foreign policy experience. She hasn’t been to Iraq, she didn’t get a passport until 2007, she never met with foreign leaders until this week….that last bit may be misleading. She most certainly has.
It’s true she flubbed the question about Russia in her interview with Katie Couric, but Curic flubbed the question too. A state governor isn’t supposed to have met with foreign leaders above her “pay grade” although that might have been a plus. How many German State Minister Presidents have met with Bush? Has the First Minister of Scotland had conferences with Putin or Amedinijad?
Probably not.
So let’s go down the scale a bit. On the 15th of this month there was an international summit in Bar Harbor, Maine. The premiers of six Canadian provinces and governors of seven American states got together to discuss issues that affected the region. These guys communicate and visit with each other all the time and this is in fact foreign policy. The governor of Maine knows the premiers of Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia just as well as he knows the governors of Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Next to Alaska are the Canadian province of British Columbia and the territory of the Yukon and the Russian Oblast of Chukotka. Has she met with the governor of Chukotka and premiers of the Yukon or BC?
Until last July, the governor of Chukotka was Roman Arkadyevich Abramovich, who according to Wikipedia, was the fifteenth richest non-royal in the world, a billionaire who has $23.5 billion in assets, and now lives in a posh London exile. Did she communicate with him at all during the year and a half they were both governors? Has she met with his successor, Roman Kopin, or even talked with him on the phone? Whether or not she’s met Vladimir Putin or Dmitiry Medvedev is not germane here. What is Alaska’s relationship with Chutkotka?
Canada’s northwest’s relationship with Palin and Alaska is a different story entirely, and is more germane to Palin’s foreign policy experience. This has to do with North America’s oil and natural gas supplies and actually has relevance to the standard of living for those living in the lower 48.
Back before either Palin or Albertan premier Ed Stelmach had taken office, their predecessors Tony Knowles and Ralph Klein signed a treaty (called a “memorandum of understanding” to prevent charges of secessionism) aimed, among other things, at starting up a natural gas pipeline to provide energy for oil mining in what’s now the US’s largest foreign supplier of oil.
One of the provisions of the “memo” was to set up a thing called the Alaska- Alberta Bilateral Council (AABC), which has some control over the Natural gas pipeline, which would be built in the territory of Alberta and the Yukon. One of her genuine achievements was getting funding for it, $40 billion worth, and cutting out the big three oil companies from the project and giving it to a company called TransCanada.
However, and here’s where foreign policy comes in, the Indians living in the Yukon have objected to the plan, and so has the Yukon government, which, wasn’t consulted originally and practically had to barge into the public meetings that took place in May. They want more money and control, and this is holding up the finalization of the deal. There are also objections about whether or not it’s right to have a Canadian company running such a project. It’s all very complicated.
This whole thing has to have the cooperation of a territorial and two provincial governments, not to mention the federal Canadian and American governments, which have to sign on the deal. Alaska’s relationship with her neighbors and how Palin has managed it is a genuine issue in this campaign. Getting into the details might show us how smart she really is.