Over the course of this week, OffTheBus is running a primer on some of the most important foreign policy issues the next president will face. The primer can act as a guide to how candidates Barack Obama and John McCain stand on each issue. Check out the links for more information on these issues. Today, the primer looks at where Obama and McCain stand on national security and nuclear proliferation.
National Security: Barack Obama
You can learn a lot about the candidates by perusing their websites. Not only by examining their policies, but also by analyzing the way they break down the issues. For example, Barack Obama's take on National Security has two separate but complimentary components. He argues that we must create a 21st Century Military for America while simultaneously Protecting our Homeland.
On the military front, Barack Obama argues that our military is overstretched. Last summer he noted that "the Pentagon cannot certify a single army unit within the United States as fully ready to respond in the event of a new crisis or emergency beyond Iraq" and that "88 percent of the National Guard is not ready to deploy overseas." To mitigate this problem, he proposes that "we should expand our ground forces by adding 65,000 soldiers to the army and 27,000 marines."
It is unclear what Obama will do to incentivize nearly 90,000 new recruits. The Bush Administration seems to have already tried everything.
Fortunately, Obama realizes that "enhancing our military will not be enough." Perhaps most presciently, Obama sees that in the 21st Century there will be new and unconventional threats to our security. These threats will necessitate "securing loose weapons and nuclear materials from terrorists; working to stop ethnic killing and genocide in Africa; and investing in our ability to combat epidemic diseases like avian flu that can be deadly at home and sew instability abroad."
Obama might want to give some thought to the Global Food Crisis, and the Global Water Crisis. Some conflicts begin because of alleged WMDs. Others occur because people are simply hungry.
On the home front, Obama advocates
"spending homeland security dollars on the basis of risk...[by] investing more resources to defend mass transit, closing the gaps in our aviation security by screening all cargo on passenger airliners and checking all passengers against a comprehensive watch list, and upgrading port security by ensuring that cargo is screened for radiation."
Unlike George W. Bush and Heckuva Job Brownie, Obama realizes that while terrorism remains our greatest security threat, it is far from our only one. By deploying more and better trained operatives and diplomats abroad while protecting our chemical plants and improving our infrastructure at home, Obama aims to proactively protect our country.
That sounds more reassuring than duct tape.
National Security: John McCain
John McCain is a tough guy when it comes to national security.
His website highlights his extensive national security priorities: Strengthen our military. Fight against violent Islamic extremists and terrorist tactics. Create effective missile defense. Increase the size of the American military. Modernize the Armed Services. Engage in smarter defense spending. Give more support to our military personnel and our veterans.
That's a lot of guns.
Although he never mentions it on his website, John McCain admitted in March of this year that "prevailing in this struggle [against Islamic terrorism] will require far more than military force. It will require the use of all elements of our national power: public diplomacy; development assistance; law enforcement training; expansion of economic opportunity; and robust intelligence capabilities."
That's a little better.
In case you haven't heard, McCain is a former POW, and thus is anti-torture. Instead of allowing banned torture techniques to creep into his continued War on Terror, McCain aims to "create a new specialty in strategic interrogation" within the military "in order to produce more interrogators who can obtain critical knowledge from detainees by using advanced psychological techniques, rather than the kind of abusive tactics properly prohibited by the Geneva Conventions." Unfortunately McCain hasn't always been this clear as to what should and shouldn't be prohibited.
In order to double down on the successes of the CIA, McCain also proposes the creation of a new intelligence agency, which would be patterned "after the erstwhile Office of Strategic Services." The original Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was a spy agency created after World War II and was the precursor to today's CIA. McCain insists that a "modern-day OSS could draw together specialists in unconventional warfare, civil affairs, and psychological warfare; covert-action operators; and experts in anthropology, advertising, and other relevant disciplines from inside and outside government."
If you wonder why they aren't doing all of these things right now over at the CIA (or in the Department of Homeland Security) you are out of luck. If we explain it to you, we'll have to kill you.
Actually, it is impossible to know what McCain has in mind regarding this new organization, as he has yet to publish any further information on his idea. US News and World Report has noted that "the original OSS was a freewheeling organization of intelligence pioneers who operated with little oversight and whose primary mission was conducting sabotage operations in war-torn Europe."
Because clearly what the world needs now is more state-sponsored sabotage.
P.S. If you have been keeping score, so far we have uncovered two entirely new governmental organizations that John McCain wants to create from scratch: the OSS and a League of Democracies. So much for the party of small government.
Nuclear Proliferation: Barack Obama
Obama seems genuinely concerned about nuclear proliferation. He cosponsored the Nuclear Weapons Threat Reduction Act of 2007, currently pending in the Senate. (An in-depth analysis of the bill can be found on Nukes on a Blog.)
However, his resistance to nuking the terrorists got him branded him as 'softie' during the presidential primaries.
"I think it would be a profound mistake for us to use nuclear weapons in any circumstance involving civilians," said Obama when asked whether he supported nuking Osama bin Laden.
Now that he's battling a former military man for Commander-in-Chiefdom, Obama is trying to sound tough, while still appealing to those hippie anti-nuclear annihilation types in his base. Obama says that he'll maintain "a strong deterrent" as long as other nations possess the bomb, but that he will stop developing new nuclear weapons and will "work with Russia to take U.S. and Russian ballistic missiles off hair trigger alert."
Obama calls the spread of nuclear weapons and the risk that terrorists will get their hands on the bomb "the most urgent threat to the security of America and the world...The explosion of one such device would bring catastrophe, dwarfing the devastation of 9/11 and shaking every corner of the globe."
More specifically, Obama said in 2005 that stockpiles of weapons in the former Soviet Union represented the biggest threat to US security. He wants to make securing these stockpiles a priority during his presidency.
"As President, I will lead a global effort to secure all nuclear weapons and material at vulnerable sites within four years...we should also negotiate a verifiable global ban on the production of new nuclear weapons material," Senator Obama remarked to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
He also, of course, wants to keep Iran and North Korea from getting the bomb, and he hopes to globalize the ban on intermediate-range missiles.
Obama says that his ultimate goal is a world free of nuclear weapons.
Nuclear Proliferation: John McCain
John McCain has had several opportunities to vote on nuclear disarmament bills since he was first elected to Senate in 1986.
He voted in favor of a treaty to safeguard nuclear weapons materials in former Soviet States in 1992, and in favor of an arms reduction treaty between the United States and Russia in 1993. But he voted against ratifying the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1999.
McCain says he might think about rethinking the treaty if elected: "As president I will pledge to continue America's current moratorium on testing, but also begin a dialogue with our allies, and with the U.S. Senate, to identify ways we can move forward to limit testing...This would include taking another look at the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty to see what can be done to overcome the shortcomings that prevented it from entering into force. I opposed that treaty in 1999, but said at the time I would keep an open mind about future developments."
So McCain has an open mind about considering steps to prevent total nuclear annihilation. That's promising.
McCain stresses that the United States needs to continue to deploy a nuclear deterrent, and says he only supports the development of new nuclear weapons that are "absolutely essential" to maintaining that deterrent.
On his website, McCain says that he wants greater cooperation between Russia and the United States on "early warning data and prior notification of missile launches." On a side note, his running mate recently said that she would support going to war with Russia if Georgia joined NATO. That might put a little damper on this planned cooperation.
Unlike the softy Democrats, McCain keeps up his tough-guy military image and wants everyone to know he's not afraid to push the button.
"It's naive to say that we will never use nuclear weapons," commented Senator McCain at a 2007 Republican Debate.
Check out the foreign policy primer on Immigration and International Diplomacy, and the one on Energy and Environmental Policy and the AIDS crisis.
This week OffTheBus is publishing a variety of stories that cover the presidential election from an international perspective.