By Samuel Rubenfeld
Three experts discussed John McCain’s and Barack Obama’s foreign policy positions at an Educate 08 panel held in the Axinn Library’s Business Development Center on Tuesday.
Nancy Soderberg, a former ambassador to the United Nations during the Bill Clinton administration, Jay Parker, a retired Army colonel who is an adjunct associate professor at Columbia and George Washington Universities, and Peter Beinart, the editor-at-large of The New Republic, each spoke for about 15 minutes before answering questions from the moderator, Meena Bose, the chair of the University’s Peter S. Kalikow Center for the Study of the American Presidency.
Each panelist approached the issue of foreign policy differently. Soderberg gave a laundry list of issues the next administration will face.
“Pakistan is the most dangerous country on Earth,” she said as she finished the list, emphasizing the country’s instability and its possession of nuclear weapons. “Seven out of eight Muslim countries think the U.S. will attack them militarily,” Soderberg said.
Soderberg also said that the long list of problems will be relatively easy to solve if the U.S. shows it shares the priorities of the rest of the world.
“Helping the rest of the world with its problems [will be] critical to U.S. foreign policy, whether in an Obama administration or a McCain administration,” she said.
The former ambassador listed seven ways for the U.S. to “get ahead of the curve” on issues, including ending the Iraq war, alleviating world poverty and broadening the definition of terrorism.
Parker, who is a member of a national security group advising Obama, said U.S. foreign policy institutions are broken and militarized.
“If budgets are an indication of policy…then something is out of balance,” he said. The latest federal budget appropriated more than $600 billion for the Defense Department, yet it only doled about $30 billion to the U.S. diplomatic corps, Parker said.
Beinart, asserting that Parker was overly generalizing, described the opposing ways in which the candidates see the world. Obama sees a world where nations could potentially collectively cooperate, whereas McCain sees perpetual conflict in an “us versus them” mentality, he said.
He added that the difference stems all the way back from a fundamental disagreement over the role of the U.S. in the world after World War I, when progressives like Woodrow Wilson wanted to create a League of Nations under which the world would cooperate on major issues. Conservatives of the time wanted to make a balance-of-power system where countries would serve their self-interest.