The so-called pundits have been loath to make predictions on who will win the big general election: Barack Obama or John McCain. That is largely because of the new variables injected into the race for the first time, including race itself. Democratic voters have produced a half-black man as a viable candidate in the general election. Additionally, here are two candidates exactly 25 years apart in age, making this an epic generational battle featuring the war hero vs. the first post-baby boom nominee.
More importantly than the horse race, we are arriving at a defining moment in America’s history, a battle for its very soul unlike any we have seen before. Nothing exemplifies this better than the foreign policy fireworks from both ends of the campaign trail. As the titans rush toward a clash, we are simultaneously hurtling toward a reckoning of the grand question that instills great fear in the citizenry: what is America’s role in the complex new world supposed to be?
Without a sitting president or vice-president in contention, there is no prospect of continuing the policies of the last 8 years. The man representing the President’s party, John McCain, is distancing himself from those 8 years out of political necessity, on top of having bona fide disagreements with the White House. Change is therefore inevitable, and the question becomes what shape it will take. Which is good, because the national mood is pretty dour at the moment, with the economy slumping, a war dragging on, and the planet slow-roasting. Most of the American electorate, woefully unprepared to judge what is going on abroad due to a lack of knowledge about the outside world, will cast its votes on the strength of the highly intelligent and well-informed candidates’ arguments.
Meanwhile, the world is far more complicated and smaller for Americans than it used to be. The oceans protecting us feel like ponds now. For much of the last 70 years, American presidential candidates operated with a consensus on the foreign policy landscape. Both major parties spat out candidates who agreed on important matters, with few exceptions. Between 1936 and 1988, most major candidates, and for that matter the electorate, did not quibble excessively on things. Hitler bad. Nazism bad. Soviets bad. Communism bad. Puppies good. If you disagreed, you were out of the mainstream. There were differences on how to contain our threats, but even the most contentious disagreement of that era, fought in the mosquito-bitten jungles of Vietnam, was bipartisan in nature: a Democrat started the war, and a Republican propagated it before ending it after people of all stripes flooded Washington with anti-war sentiment. Vietnam could not be defined by a neat Democrat/Republican rift. Nor, for that matter, could the dramatic civil rights movement of that same period. The difference today is that we have consensus agreement on the emergence of a new threat, but the two parties can’t even agree on how to define it, let alone how to defeat it.
Since the 1992 election, America has been unsure about its role in the world. In 1996, 2000, and 2004 the foreign policy positions of the candidates could not be sharply distinguished. There has been no Cold War, no Evil Empire to make our strategy simple and coherent. Although George Bush Sr. won a glorious military victory in Iraq in 1991 and garnered an 89% approval rating, he lost in 1992 because the economy was seen as more important in Americans’ eyes than a masterful foreign policy. Today Americans fear not fascism, communism, or even rogue dictators like Saddam. Our attention is on the frightening specter of terrorism, the hydra with tentacles in 50 countries, including card-carrying members possibly living and breathing amongst us in our American cities, using the Internet to recruit, train, organize and fundraise- taking advantage of the very communications weapon invented in the 1970’s and 1980’s by the U.S. army, against us within just a few decades. From what I have read, the thread that connects these terrorists together is: nothing at all. Not education or a lack thereof, not religious beliefs, not poverty, and not family background. It’s not helpful to categorically define these people as psychiatrically deranged; how does that separate them from the millions of people worldwide with mental problems, who may pursue a regular old life of petty crime, or a benign existence rocking back and forth in a dark basement to Britney Spears songs?
The fragility, and irony, of international relations today lies in the fact that today’s buddies could quickly become tomorrow’s enemies. Saddam Hussein’s army and Osama Bin Laden’s mujahideen fighters were funded and supplied by American taxpayer dollars as recently as the 1980’s, because they were our pawns on the Cold War chessboard. It was easy to justify and understand what we were doing in the context of the Cold War: we needed them and they needed us. Both political parties accepted the deals we used to make with the Devil in those days if it helped bring down the USSR. Now the cheeky, ragtag bandits of the Middle East are using some of the same guerrilla tactics against their former masters that we used to liberate ourselves from the British in the 1700’s. Today the American and British soldiers die on the desert sands side-by-side to be sent home in body bags. Indeed Iraqis themselves jerked off the British colonial yoke once before, in the 1920’s, and are only too gleeful to do so again.
At long last, we have two candidates with drastically different positions on all of this. And their talking points are shaped from deeply-held beliefs, not milquetoast positions molded over polling data and micro-trends in the suburbs of Florida and Ohio. McCain and Obama formed their cores over a lifetime of public service and real experiences in foreign countries. McCain was tortured in the dungeons of Hanoi during the Vietnam War, and Obama cried on his father’s grave in a Kenyan village, weeping for the parent that he hardly knew. McCain descended from a long line of military brass stationed abroad, and Obama was partially raised by a pistol-toting Indonesian stepfather with a pet crocodile who taught him boxing to protect himself while frolicking with local Indonesian boys in the woods.
Although both candidates obviously favor the eradication of terrorism as a threat, the contrast on how the would-be Commanders in Chief intend to achieve this elusive goal could not be clearer, especially on the streets of Iraq. McCain seeks to stay in Iraq until we have achieved some sort of "victory" before bringing the troops home. Obama would try to bring most of the troops home by 2010, claiming that in the final analysis, a stable Iraq is not in America’s hands but in the hands of Iraqis themselves. Neither is a good policy choice, because the Iraq quagmire has placed us in an untenable position: we are damned if we stay in the quicksand, and we are damned if we leave.
Perpetuating America’s presence ad infinitum, loosely linked to Bush’s current policy except for the fact that McCain would throw more troops into the mix, carries the risk of encouraging terrorist recruitment, funding, and even advancing the state of the art, as terrorists perfect weapons and tactics against our boys trying to patrol the neighborhoods of Baghdad and other cities. These could later be used in New York. The likely outcome of a longer presence is more of the same problems we are seeing today: sectarian bloodshed bordering on low-level civil war, violent intra-sect struggles for power, many more American lives lost or maimed, and an army that is increasingly broken and unable to respond to other threats in the world. The conflicts in Iraq are many centuries old, and we are being caught in the crossfire. Ultimately we are headed toward a draft if we stay in Iraq much longer as the military slogs to fill its ranks with incrementally less-qualified volunteers. There’s also a larger likelihood that foreigners will continue striving for an attack on the American homeland while our troops struggle to achieve a vague mandate to play referee abroad.
Leaving Iraq, on the other hand, could result in the gory torture or death of many Iraqis who supported us, and a genocidal fury between Sunnis and Shias that would put America to shame as a helpless loser in this war. Iraq could become a terrorist safe haven (more so than it is now), a place where the finest jihadists from around the world go to graduate from hands-on terror school, analagous to our own Harvard or Stanford. For this reason leaving Iraq is far more risky than leaving Vietnam was. The Shia majority leadership might quietly become an Iranian vassal state, spawning a new two-headed monster with plenty of oil, the potential for nuclear weaponry, additional non-state brigades in the diverse shapes of Al-Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah, and a desire to wipe Israel off the map. Not exactly the kind of withdrawal with dignity America would like to see in the Middle East, whether led by Democrats or Republicans. Then again, all of this could happen even if we stayed.
We might end up damned if we stay, damned if we leave, damned if either man is president; or we may see a glorious reversal of fortunes under the right nuanced formula delicately combining the arts of diplomacy and war, under the right leadership. But how to deal with other rogue states such as Cuba, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, and North Korea? The two candidates have drastically different plans on engaging these states as well. Obama would like to increase the force in Afghanistan, which directly contradicts the left-wing label that Republicans are trying to pin on him. He would attack Al-Qaeda wherever they are to be found, if the host country is unwilling or unable to do so, even if they are an ally like Pakistan. And he would negotiate with hostile leaders, however unsavory they might be. He would decrease travel restrictions with Cuba. Obama seeks to let foreign leaders and citizens know exactly where America stands, to open up a dialogue and hopefully some sense of agreement moving forward from the universally reviled Bush era. Obama is willing to back up failed diplomacy with force. Indeed, he says that military options "will always be on the table" during his presidency. Those who worry oppose Obama have already labeled him as an "appeaser" who is unwilling to defend America from the scary people, and would rather have tea with them.
McCain’s worldview, and approach to others around us, is radically different. His warrior mentality clearly extends to most potential international problems: he wants to scare other countries by flexing American muscle, so they will bend to our demands. Iran, you’d better not try to develop nuclear weapons, because if you do, we’ll bomb you. In McCain’s opinion, there is no foreign threat that cannot be vanquished by the U.S. sword. This policy was certainly well-suited to the Cold War and bringing down the Soviet Union, the comfortable rubrics in place for most of McCain’s 71 years, but we now live in a multi-polar world where threats in the near future could come from non-state actors on our own soil, as well as rising powers such as China and India. We can’t simply bomb everybody. On the other hand, projecting military power might be effective if foreigners began to see America’s brandishing of it as principled and moral, as McCain claims to want.
Since the Obama-McCain campaign has only just begun, the pair has not been able to debate directly on foreign policy yet. Right now we are seeing a back-and-forth more shaped by early definition politics, with each one calling the other’s ideas "naive," which is not really helpful, and is not true in either case. Needless to say, both brands of foreign policy carry their advantages and disadvantages, and it should be interesting to see in which direction the campaigns will choose to go on these subjects. America’s future role in the world is in the balance as never before, hanging on how Americans respond to the arguments from both sides. There will be a lot more coverage of all of this in the next 6 months, along with questions on the environment, energy policy, the economy, and healthcare. Needless to say, all of these issues have an effect on, and are affected by, foreign policy. This debate is not only exciting for America, it is inherently good for us.