Legal Commentary

The Candidates and World Leadership

By TChris

Steve Hamm, a senior writer at Business Week, worries about the nation's diminishing role as a world leader.

Over the past eight years, the United States has lost a tremendous amount of influence on the world. The Bush administration's stance on global warming, its bullying style, the war in Iraq, and lack of leadership on fair trade have left the country as an outlier in the global community of nations rather than a true leader. So one of the most important tasks of the next president will be to fix that.

Hamm views John McCain as "positively enlightened" compared to Bush. McCain talks about the need to lead "by demonstrating once again the virtues of freedom and democracy, by defending the rules of international civilized society and by creating the new international institutions necessary to advance the peace and freedoms we cherish." But Hamm quite rightly worries that McCain undermined that position by selecting a vice presidential candidate who counteracts his message. [more ...]

[Palin is] a person who is focused narrowly on the provincial interests of conservative, right-wing Americans (or maybe just Alaskans), who advocates exploiting natural resources and burning fuel rather than conserving and coming up with energy alternatives, and who considers the defense of human rights to be unpatriotic. Imagine how the leaders of the rest of the world would deal with her as president. The United States would be a laughingstock among nations.

Hamm argues that McCain could "start to redeem America in the world's eyes" if he drops Palin, but not otherwise.

Barack Obama, on the other hand, has an immediate advantage over McCain, in Hamm's view.

It's clear from Obama's reception in Europe and the Middle East earlier this year that world leaders would embrace him as a colleague.

Obama, Hamm writes, is "insisting that the values we (or at least some of us) hold dear are fully expressed in how we engage with the world."

Maybe most voters don't care about how America is perceived in the world. President Bush certainly doesn't. But voters who are concerned about the nation's loss of its leadership role in the world should heed Hamm's analysis. McCain isn't about to jettison Palin, given the reception she received at the Republican National Convention. If voters want the United States to regain its standing as an international leader, Obama is the clear choice.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on September 05, 2008 (boomark / email).