Which candidate would be best on foreign policy and why.

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Foreign policy can be, erm, pretty profitable. Not entirely moral of course, but playing the world's policeman can be quite lucrative if you play your cards right. Of course, America is suffering intensely because a lot of cards (mostly under the reign of Bush) have been played entirely wrong since the propaganda win that was the end of the Cold War.

Anyway, nobody would be very good on foreign policy. Obama has been relatively decent - perhaps as decent as a POtUS can be on the issue - but I trust no candidate of either party to make a remotely coherent message on the issue. No wonder the Democrats are heading to familiar terrain like domestic issues.

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I'm not opposed to intervention by any standards. Indeed there are many occasions where the world has simply ignored tragedy - Rwanda being the most obvious, and one of the darker stains on the Clinton administration. I don't accept that very Trot opinion that contemporary world politics is merely the bogeyman imperialist America and her pawns (NATO, the GCC, Japan, S. Korea, Australia) undermining the practically inert victims of Russia, China and Iran. I think America is, or at least has the potential to be, a force for good. It fought the greatest evil the twentieth century has known after all, and even though the Cold War took America down some dark paths in Latin America, SE Asia, South Africa and the Middle East, it was undoubtedly the moral of the two opposing sides. But post-Cold War America's overall "mission" has been largely disjointed. Syria and Iraq are basically two all-encompassing sources of eggs on Western faces. America is led around by its nationalistic and self-interested allies across the globe (it makes me laugh at the idea of the U.S. being some master puppet master - it's more like a dogwalker with far too many dogs)


I'll admit a lot of the Pentagon budget can be shredded off the bat. The nuclear arms program could easily be downsized for one (why the U.S. continues to have ICMB's I'll never know).

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I support cooperation, but at what point does "cooperation" become "coddling"? True, America does look the other way at its allies' indiscretions as realpolitik demands, but at some level you have to have a moral dimension to foreign policy, otherwise you end up with Henry Kissinger.