Election News and Features
Election Issues: Foreign Policy
by findingDulcinea Staff
John McCain and Barack Obama disagree on how to manage the United States’ presence in Iraq, counteract terrorism and handle foreign affairs. Learn more about their conflicting stances in findingDulcinea’s survey of key issues in the November election.
Both candidates have promised to make national security a top priority. However, McCain’s campaign focuses on strengthening the military against Islamic extremists while Obama favors a renewal of American diplomacy.
Compare Barack Obama’s report on foreign affairs, “Renewing American Leadership,” to John McCain’s essay, entitled, “An Enduring Peace Built on Freedom.”
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.
Source: Salon News
Obama’s counterterrorism strategy, as outlined at the June 19, 2008, Foreign Policy Summit in Washington, D.C., will be guided by “military force, intelligence operations, financial sanctions, and diplomatic action.” He plans to allocate more resources to Afghanistan in an effort to finish the fight against al-Qaida and the Taliban.
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.
Source: RealClearPolitics
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.
Source: The Atlantic Monthly
For more information on foreign policy read findingDulcinea's U.S. Foreign Relations Web Guide.
© 2019 Dulcinea Media, Inc.
