A New York Times article includes the following in regards to Obama’s foreign policy team:
Most of the core members of his team served in government during President Bill Clinton’s administration and by and large were junior to the advisers who worked on Mrs. Clinton’s campaign for the Democratic nomination. But they remain in charge within the campaign even as it takes on more senior figures from the Clinton era, like two former secretaries of state, Madeleine K. Albright and Warren Christopher, and are positioned to put their own stamp on the party’s foreign policy.
Will we see Madeleine K. Albright using the carrots of engagement and the sticks of sanctions to solve current U.S. foreign policy dilemmas? Will we see Warren Christopher create a multinational coalition to combat terrorism like Bush did, a move Christopher praised less than one year after 9/11?
Will both repeat history and rely on sanctions that kill thousands of children? Albright did think the “price was worth it” when half a million children died as a result of sanctions on Iraq.
With Albright and Christopher on the team, and with Zbigniew Brzezinski being pushed out of his team due to positions that upset AIPAC, it is my belief that based on past conduct we can expect a team that is reliant on Big Stick Diplomacy, a form of hegemony that was made popular by Theodore Roosevelt when he was president.
Big Stick Diplomacy is waged with the belief that a nation has the right to oppose other nation’s actions. It also is waged with the belief that a nation has the right to intervene economically and militarily in domestic affairs of other countries if they pose a threat to peace or sovereignty.
When examining what has been put together to take on the challenges of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran, there is a huge change Obama will be offering Big Stick Diplomacy as a significant part of his foreign policy if elected.
If Big Stick Diplomacy is what he will offer to the world, I challenge people to describe the differences between Big Stick Diplomacy and confrontation/isolation policies favored by McCain in a way that would convince me one is worth being voted for over the other.
Garrett proceeds to examine the differences between McCain and Obama on domestic policy. But, health care and tax cuts cannot be taken care of if we continue the “war on terror” and keep the bloated military budget. Obama has no problem with expanding our military budget, according to The Progressive:
Sen. Barack Obama is forsaking the position of most African-Americans on the issue of ever-escalating U.S. military spending. And progressive black leaders are letting him get away with it.
For decades, Black America has maintained a general consensus in favor of “butter” in the national “butter or bullets” debate. The call for a “Marshall Plan” to rebuild America’s cities has been a constant in African-American public discourse, inevitably coupled with demands for lower military spending.
The collapse of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty under a tsunami of Vietnam expenditures proved that war spells the death of urban domestic dreams.
Now, however, for the first time since World War II, we witness a self-imposed silence on war spending among a number of black opinion-molders who would be shouting their heads off at the prospect of an even larger U.S. military establishment. The reason for this voluntary stand-down: Barack Obama supports the addition of nearly 100,000 soldiers and Marines in coming years, and he doesn’t want to be embarrassed by loud black voices of protest during his dash for the brass ring.
“I strongly support the expansion of our ground forces by adding 65,000 soldiers to the Army and 27,000 Marines,” Obama told the Chicago Council on Global Affairs last April.
That’s precisely the number favored by President Bush’s Defense Secretary Robert Gates over a five-year period at a cost of $108 billion, as estimated by the Congressional Budget Office. Sen. Hillary Clinton would add at least 80,000 troops, Rudy Giuliani wants 70,000 additional pairs of boots on the ground, somewhere on the planet, and Mitt Romney would add 100,000.
To what purpose? Both Republicans and front-running Democrats claim to be aiming for dramatically lower U.S. troop numbers in Iraq, over varying, vague spaces of time. Where will the new troops be deployed? A central lesson of human history is that armies are raised in order to be sent somewhere.
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