Cox & Stokes: US Foreign Policy 
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Essay questionsCox & Stokes: US Foreign Policy
Foreign Policy and the Race for the White House
When the contest for the Democratic nomination ended in June with Hillary Clinton’s eventual admission of defeat, the race for the White House began in earnest. As might be expected, foreign policy has subsequently emerged as a key battlefield between the two contenders for the Oval office.
Prior to the conclusion of the Democratic nomination process, Barack Obama’s ideas on US foreign and security policy were contrasted as much against those of Hillary Clinton (on the Iraq issue, for example) as they were against the perspectives of the Republican presidential nominee John McCain. Since then the foreign policy positions of the two presidential contenders have come under greater scrutiny, because foreign policy is an area in which both McCain and Obama have sought to emphasize the distinctiveness of their respective agendas: from each other and from the Bush administration.
Both presidential candidates have sought, to differing extents and with differing degrees of success, to distance their visions for US foreign policy from that of the current administration. Given the declining popularity of George W. Bush and diminished public support for the Iraq war, both Obama and McCain have argued that their approaches to foreign policy will constitute a “change” from that of the Bush era.
For Obama this objective has in some ways been easier to achieve. His initial opposition to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and continued insistence that it was a ‘distraction’ from the effort to deal with global terrorism has formed a mainstay of Obama’s claim that his leadership would genuinely alter the direction of US foreign policy. More recently Obama has welcomed the extension of habeas corpus rights to non-citizen prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay (which would allow court rulings on whether their detention is legal). Critics of the Bush administration hope that this signals a broader commitment to curbing the perceived excesses of the War on Terror in relation to civil liberties.
Against this the McCain camp has made the argument that such claims indicate that Obama is ‘soft’ on issues of national security. McCain has consistently maintained that the US military is capable of fighting and winning the war in Iraq, and his support for maintenance of the US presence in Iraq is a major distinction from Obama’s stance on the issue. Whilst McCain has pledged to close Guantanamo, he declared the Supreme Court’s decision to extend habeas corpus to be ‘one of the worst’ in American history. McCain and his supporters have also made much of Obama’s earlier suggestion that he would countenance the idea of negotiations with Iran over its alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons. This was portrayed by Republicans as tantamount to appeasement, and Obama has since rowed back from this position.
In short, the McCain team has made the case that their candidate is ‘tough’ on issues of national security as is distinct, they argue, from Obama. However a challenge faced by McCain is in convincing voters that his foreign policy agenda is significantly different from that of the Bush administration (with Democrats branding the Republican nominee as ‘McSame’). The continuation of the Iraq campaign is an issue is this regard.
Another prominent example is McCain’s espousal of the idea of a ‘League of Democracies’. This proposal envisages that the US and the world’s other leading democracies should band together as a means of compensating for the UN’s unwieldy decision-making structure in the face of humanitarian crises such as Darfur and Burma. In this McCain has taken his lead from his foreign policy advisor Robert Kagan and his latest treatise The Return of History and the End of Dreams, where Kagan argues that the world’s democracies must unite against the threat of autocratic regimes that will seek to challenge the current global order.
The ‘League of Democracies’ idea, critics charge, smacks of the neoconservative rhetoric of democracy promotion and the Bush administrations general disregard for the UN. Kagan is regarded by many as an arch-neoconservative (though he himself rejects this label) and was an influential proponent of the invasion of Iraq during the first term of the Bush administration. Such ties weaken the case that McCain’s foreign policy would be a radical break from that of the Bush administration. Ironically, key members of Obama’s foreign policy team – such as Ivo Daalder and Anthony Lake – are also reportedly sympathetic to the thrust of Kagan’s argument, which suggests that the differences between the presidential candidates on issues of foreign and security policy may not be as extreme as their campaign teams might lead us to believe.
Think Points:
What are the main differences and similarities between the emergent foreign policy agendas of Barack Obama and John McCain?
Why do Republicans argue that Obama is potentially ‘soft’ on issues of national security?
To what extent do the foreign policy ideas of Obama and McCain differ from those of the George W. Bush era?
What are the main features of the idea of a ‘League of Democracies’ as proposed by McCain and Kagan?
To what extent has McCain been influenced by neoconservative thinking with regard to his ideas on foreign policy?
How important is foreign policy likely to be in the race for the White House relative to other issues such as the economy and social security?
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