Tonight President Barack Hussein Obama and Republican Challenger Mitt Romney will square off for the final Presidential Debate, which will be on Foreign Policy.
According to the New York Times:
When President Obama and Mitt Romney sit down Monday night for the last of their three debates, two things should be immediately evident: there should be no pacing the stage or candidates’ getting into each other’s space, and there should be no veering into arguments over taxes.
This debate is about how America deals with the world — and how it should.
If the moderator, Bob Schieffer of CBS News, has his way, it will be the most substantive of the debates. He has outlined several topics: America’s role in the world, the continuing war in Afghanistan, managing the nuclear crisis with Iran and the resultant tensions with Israel, and how to deal with rise of China.
The most time, Mr. Schieffer has said, will be spent on the Arab uprisings, their aftermath and how the terrorist threat has changed since the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. No doubt the two candidates will spar again, as they did in the second debate, about whether the Obama administration was ready for the attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed J. Christopher Stevens, the American ambassador, and three other Americans. Mr. Romney was widely judged to not have had his most effective critique ready, and this time, presumably, he will be out to correct that.
The early line is that this is an opportunity for Mr. Obama to shine, and to repair the damage from the first debate. (He was already telling jokes the other night, at a dinner in New York, about his frequent mention of Osama bin Laden’s demise.)
I’ve heard Former Ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, who is also Mitt Romney’s Foreign Policy Adviser, state that Romney’s approach to Foreign Affairs with be like that of President Reagan: “Peace Through Strength”.
Amb. Bolton explained that concept further in an interview he did in September with The Washington Times:
It is central to successful U.S. foreign policy that we achieve the overwhelming preponderance of our key objectives diplomatically, without the use of force. But as the Romans said, si vis pacem, para bellum: If you want peace, prepare for war. George Washington used the maxim in his first State of the Union address, and in our day, Ronald Reagan characterized his policy as “peace through strength.” The point is clear.
Unfortunately, too many mistake resolve for belligerence. President Obama, for example, acts as if American strength is provocative, that we are too much in the world, and that a lesser U.S. profile would make other nations better disposed toward us. This is exactly backwards. It is not our strength that is provocative, but our weakness, which simply emboldens our adversaries to take advantage of what they see as decline and retreat.
…When our opponents sense a weak, inattentive U.S. administration, they are obviously motivated to seize the opening before a Reagan-like president appears. So, when Mr. Obama pleads with Russian President Medvedev to give him “space” before our election so Obama can be more “flexible” afterward, our adversaries take careful note. And when China’s official news agency scoffed last week that, “U.S. power is declining and it hasn’t enough economic strength or resources to dominate the Asia-Pacific region,” China’s neighbors shudder.
The perception of U.S. weakness can certainly be reversed, as Reagan did, but the costs are inevitably high. Today, debilitating cuts in the national-defense budget, with more to come if the sequestration provisions kick in, only make the task of rebuilding harder. International leadership is undeniably a burden, and many other countries benefit as free riders, but we cannot forget we are not leading out of altruism but because of the sustained economic and political benefits that accrue to America. We cannot have one without the other.
…George H.W. Bush correctly assessed his 1988 opponent Michael Dukakis by saying, “He sees America as another pleasant country on the U.N. roll call, somewhere between Albania and Zimbabwe.” This is essentially Mr. Obama’s view, that of a self-described “citizen of the world.” It rests on two elements. One is “moral equivalency,” seeing all nations as fungible, no one having a higher claim than another, including our own. Iran, North Korea, America — it’s just too parochial to treat them differently. The other is “mirror imaging,” the fallacy of seeing other nations as operating according to our same incentives and disincentives, our rationality and our same ranking of outcomes. While we can overcome these failures, we must first be aware how pervasive they are within the American Establishment.
…Beyond question, our gravest threat comes from the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, chemical and biological) and the means to deliver them, including ballistic missiles. Whether in the hands of terrorists, rogue states or increasingly from a re-surging Russia and a rapidly advancing China, the WMD threat is growing. It has been so long since nuclear testing, above or below ground, that I worry too many Americans have lost sight of the power of nuclear weapons, seeing them as something from grainy black-and-white films from 1940s testing in Pacific atolls.
The consequences, however, are terrifying, whether we contemplate the loss of even one American city held hostage to nuclear blackmail by terrorists, or the prospect of Israel vaporizing in a nuclear holocaust. There is more to defending the United States than just the military assets we deploy. More fundamental is our basic attitude: Do we acknowledge, or not, the possibility — even the likelihood — that there are ideologies, religions or nations that wish us ill, even to the point of our destruction?
Amazingly, having just concluded a century where vicious ideologies like Nazism and Communism caused slaughter and torment beyond description, we find many political leaders — like President Obama (“the tide of war is receding”) — essentially prepared to declare “peace in our time.” No war on terror, no radical Islam, no geopolitical competitors, no nothing. This is a prescription not for peace ahead, but for imminent danger.
…Contrary to what its critics, including many in this country, say, American exceptionalism simply recognizes the reality of our distinct history. After all, a Frenchman, Alexis de Toqueville, first characterized us as “exceptional,” and he didn’t mean it entirely as a compliment! Mr. Obama once compared U.S. exceptionalism to Britain and Greece, and he easily could have listed the other 190 United Nations members. If everyone is exceptional, no one is, leading almost inexorably to believe that the United States has no special role to play internationally, even on its own behalf. It leads to a “come home, America” approach that inevitably weakens the United States, its friends and allies, and the values and interests we should be advancing.
Tonight, as you watch this last, and possibly, most important of the Presidential Debates, the question you need to decide for yourself is very simple:
Which Foreign Policy will keep Americans safer from our enemies?
A return to Peace Through Strength and American Exceptionalism?
or
A continuance of the naive acquiescence, the alienating of our allies and embracing of our enemies, that got Ambassador Chris Stevens murdered by Islamic Terrorists?
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