Election Issues: Foreign Policy

Barack Obama plans to engage in negotiations with foreign leaders, such as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, believing in diplomacy as a way of convincing countries to change their policies. In a 2007 interview with Walter Shapiro, Salon’s Washington bureau chief, Obama commented that his experiences growing up in Indonesia and visiting his grandmother in Kenya have given him an advantage over other candidates in terms of understanding developing countries.

In his speech to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on March 26, 2008, John McCain said that he does not support a premature withdrawal from Iraq, believing that it would both threaten our national security and endanger the Iraqi people. He claims it would be “an unconscionable act of betrayal” for the United States to leave the Iraqi population to defend itself against the “horrendous violence, ethnic cleansing, and possibly genocide” that would follow a removal of our troops.

In a May 2008 interview, John McCain cites fighting Islamic extremism as a top priority in the war on terrorism. He is intent upon protecting Israel and the United States from the threats of Hamas, which recently launched rocket attacks on the town of Sderot. McCain aims to secure peaceful relations by providing military equipment and assistance to Israel.