Three points leaped out of Sarah Palin's interview on FOX News Sunday.

The first was the eagerness with which Governor Palin affirmed that she 'would' run for president if it made sense for the US and the Palin family. Her response was much less equivocal than I would have imagined. She wants that job, bad.

Second, she went awfully close to saying that, if he wants to get re-elected, President Obama should declare war on...someone:

She was not precise about who exactly. Yet she cannot have meant to say that the US commander-in-chief should risk American lives (and take foreign lives) in order to win an election. Perhaps it points to the difficulty of segueing between the roles of political leader and political commentator.

Finally, Sarah Palin set herself up for increased scrutiny of her knowledge of national and international events. During the 2008 race, she implied, she was green. What about now? 'I sure as heck better be more astute on these current events and national events than I was two years ago'.

The New York Times has reported Palin is getting daily emails from advisers on policy developments. But based on the reportage in Race of a Lifetime (which I review in this Saturday's Sydney Morning Herald), it would take a vast number of such emails before Governor Palin has the minimum knowledge required to withstand the rigors of a presidential race.

I agree with Sam that Obama's Nobel Lecture was excellent — significantly better, in fact, than his speech the previous week to cadets at the US Military Academy in West Point.

If there's a rap against Obama's speechmaking, it is that — like most of us — he enjoys applause lines. Obama is not known for giving hard speeches to friendly audiences. But his Oslo speech was certainly not the one his audience would have expected, or wanted. Rather, his remarks as he received the world's biggest peace prize centred on a principled defence of the use of force for humanitarian purposes.

'We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth', said Obama, 'that we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes.' After recognizing the impact that both Martin Luther King and Mohandas Gandhi had had on his life, he said this:

But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism — it is a recognition of history: the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

At the same time, Obama implicitly criticized the unilateralism, and the excessive methods, of his predecessor George W Bush.

The news of Ted Kennedy's death took me back to the Democratic National Convention in Denver last August. I reported on Kennedy's Convention speech for The Interpreter in this way:

The two emotional high points were the speeches by Senator Edward Kennedy and Michelle Obama...Over the course of the last ten conventions, Ted Kennedy has gone from runt of the Kennedy litter to good time boy to presidential insurgent to liberal agitator to beloved ancient. He seems as monumental and timeless as the Jefferson Memorial. Of course, he is not timeless, and it was hard not to be moved by the sight of the old lion still roaring and pawing the air, and pledging to be in Washington next January for Barack Obama's inauguration.

Right-wing radio shock jock Rush Limbaugh provoked outrage in March by predicting that, by the time the health care debate was over, President Obama's plan would be called the 'Ted Kennedy Health Care Memorial Bill'. Be careful what you wish for, Rush. Ted Kennedy may yet get that memorial — and it would be a finer memorial to him than anything made of marble.

Over the past month or two I’ve been trying out Twitter. One of the people I follow — and I use that word in the narrow Twitter sense of ‘follow’, rather than the broader political sense — is Alaska Governor and former Republican VP nominee, Sarah Palin.

Palin tweets a lot. What she lacks in elegance she makes up for in energy.

A couple of weeks ago, Palin announced her intention to resign as governor, which raised eyebrows across America. Was she preparing for a run for the White House in 2012? Would she star in a reality TV show? Or would she fall back into the arms of her husband Todd and retire from public life?

That last option never seemed likely to me — and it seems even less likely given this cryptic message she broadcast a few minutes ago, as her resignation took effect:

'Last state twitter. Thank you Alaska! I love you. God bless Alaska. God bless the U.S.A.'

Is it just me, or does the qualifier in that message – ‘state’ – sound ominous?

 Photo by Flickr user sp4vp08, used under a Creative Commons license.

President Barack Obama gave another intelligent and lucid performance at the podium during his press conference yesterday. This was Obama's fourth prime-time press conference in his six months as president — the same number that his predecessor managed in eight years. Is this the be-all and end-all of governing? Nope, but it's a nice change. 

The spectacle also served to put the president's recent drop in public support into perspective. Sure, his numbers have slipped a little — but so have his rivals', and in the White House he has the world's best sound stage, and his political skills are just as sharp as they were last week, and the other contenders for his job continue to self-destruct like messages on Mission Impossible. I'd say that Obama's glass is well over three-quarters full.

It’s hard to say, though, how much he advanced the ball on health care yesterday. This is truly policy-making in a perfect storm: the issues are complex; the stakes are high; the sums are large; the deficit is huge; and the opponents are powerful. The next month will tell us something important about the ability of the US political system to digest several big issues in a short period.

Barack Obama gave a cracking speech overnight in Accra on the subject of Africa’s future. As The Wall Street Journal notes, it was the last in a series of four major international addresses Obama has given since being inaugurated, the others being his speech on nuclear issues in Prague, his finely balanced lecture on Islam and the West in Cairo (which I analysed in The Punch) and his slightly underwhelming speech on US-Russian relations in Moscow.

In Ghana, the president spoke plainly about the causes of Africa’s sorrows, criticising the brutality and corruption of some of the continent’s regimes. He acknowledged the legacy of colonialism but denied that this could be a continuing excuse for failure. He observed that his father’s birthplace, Kenya, had a per capita economy larger than South Korea’s when he was born, but has since been left behind in the economic dust.

Aides characterised Obama’s speech to The New York Times as ‘hard truths from a loving cousin’ and there is no question that, as the first African American president of the United States, his criticisms carry moral power that was not available to any of his predecessors.

The best thing about the speech was its toughness. Like most politicians, Obama enjoys delivering applause lines. I’m glad he didn’t just dwell on his biographical links to Africa, but rather deployed them to try to change Africans’ thinking and pressure errant African leaders.

Obama’s enduring international prestige is something to observe: in Cairo he left the stage to the sound of his largely Arab audience chanting ‘Obama! Obama!’; in Accra he entered the hall to the sound of Ghanaian legislators chanting ‘Yes we can! Yes we can!’ I bet Joe Nye is writing a new edition of his book, Soft Power.

Photo by Flickr user Chris Gansen, used under a Creative Commons license.

The Washington Post Magazine has an article on the decline and fall of Donald Rumsfeld, extracted from a new biography of the former US Defense Secretary by Post journalist Bradley Graham. The events described in the article took place less than three years ago but it feels like last decade's news, so radically has the scene changed in the interim.

Rumsfeld is one of Washington's great swaggerers. So it is surprising to read that after he resigned from office he went to the trouble of collecting all the congratulatory letters he received, collating them by source, filing them in ringbinders and making them available to his biographer. I'm not sure that these final commendations ever bear much resemblance to reality and I wouldn't have thought Rumsfeld's psyche was so delicate as to put much store in them.

The anecdote does include a cameo by then PM John Howard, however, who wrote to congratulate Rummy on his 'good humor and willingness to engage the news media.'

Photo by Flickr user wallyg, used under a Creative Commons license.

I enjoyed Anthony Bubalo's post on Obama's Cairo address, and in the new Australian online magazine The Punch, I've contributed my own analysis of the speech.

In The New York Times last year, I argued that the best location for this speech would be Indonesia. I hold to the view that Indonesia offered particular advantages as a venue, including the opportunity to throw light on the diversity and richness of Islam and to demonstrate that Obama takes democracy seriously, given that Indonesia is a bustling democracy and Egypt is not. I do concede, however, that Obama's speech yesterday derived some of its emotional power from being delivered in the heart of the Arab Middle East.

Going from the sublime to the ridiculous, Obama's visit to Cairo has revealed something else beside his views on America's relations with the Muslim world. It's also shown that even presidents get bad hair dye jobs: see the fourth photo in this SMH collection.

If you need a Barack Obama fix and you have a spare hour, this NBC special on his White House is one to watch.

Obama displays his usual otherworldly confidence. Rahm Emanuel is plainly a man you should cross the street to avoid. Ostensibly senior US government officials appear to be in awe of the President's body man, Reggie Love. And NBC's Brian Williams comes across as a complete goose. He is so deferential that at times I confused him with the White House butler. In the presidential limo on the way to a burger joint he's so nervous he can't make eye contact with his host. In his formal interview with Obama he devotes one of his precious questions to the president's 'basketball-life balance'. I'm afraid that Williams will soon be Exhibit A for the case that the media is 'in the tank' for Obama.

You see? The men in black do exist.

I know that NSW Premier Nathan Rees thinks he has trouble with blackouts and power cables being cut by mistake. But things are worse in Washington, DC. The Post reports that a few years ago, a construction crew working in the Virginia suburbs outside Washington (just a couple of miles from CIA headquarters in Langley, or to use its official name, the George Bush Center for Intelligence) hit a fibre optic cable by mistake. Within minutes, three black SUVs containing men in suits rolled up and the Post concludes that the crew had hit a 'black' cable used by the intelligence community.

It is remarkable how closely Americans watch appointments to the US Supreme Court. Can this level of scrutiny really be justified? Part of the explanation for the phenomenon, of course, is the US Bill of Rights, which affords American judges a greater role in the protection of human rights — and therefore in the making of policy.

If Frank Brennan's National Human Rights Consultation Committee were to recommend a bill of rights (albeit not one entrenched in our Constitution), an intriguing question would be what effect such a step would have on the process of appointing Australian judges — and the public scrutiny the process attracts.

It's great fun watching conservative commentators write about Barack Obama these days. His election victory and his continuing success presents his foreign policy critics in the media with an exquisite dilemma: do they maintain their rage against him, thereby dealing themselves out of exclusive interviews and invitations to White House confabs? Or do they begin to discern wisdom in his actions where they previously found only fault? Do they continue to throw pebbles at the bandwagon or do they clamber aboard?

In this op-ed in The Daily Beast, I examine the confusion of Obama's American critics.

So, it seems Barack has ignored my advice – and after all I’ve done for him!

During last year’s US presidential campaign, Barack Obama promised that in the first 100 days of his administration he would travel to a major Islamic forum and deliver an address to redefine the West’s relationship with Islam and its struggle against terrorism. I argued in The New York Times that Obama should buck expectations and deliver this speech outside the Arab world, specifically in Indonesia. I suggested that choosing Indonesia would throw light on the diversity of Islam, demonstrate that Obama takes democracy and human rights seriously, help him to counter anti-Americanism and indicate he was serious about rebalancing American foreign policy.

My friend and colleague Justin Vaisse from Brookings, by contrast, argued in a Times op-ed  (co-authored with noted Islamism expert Olivier Roy) that Obama should not give the speech at all, because it would reinforce perceptions of a monolithic Islam.

It turned out that both Justin and I lost our debate: the White House has announced that Obama will deliver this speech on 4 June in the heart of the Arab world, Egypt.

My only consolation is that Obama is still sure to visit Indonesia in the next little while, perhaps on his trip to the APEC meeting in Singapore in November. You cannot read the foreign policy chapter in The Audacity of Hope and fail to be struck by the effect that Obama’s years in Jakarta had on his worldview. Indeed, when The New Yorker ran an old picture of Barack and Michelle Obama earlier this year year, I noticed there were Javanese shadow puppets displayed prominently on their living room wall.

For those who are not so pointy-headed as to watch Barack Obama’s press conference live from the East Room of the White House, the president just gave Kevin Rudd a nice little shout-out:

QUESTION: Good evening, Mr. President. Thank you. Taking this economic debate a bit globally, senior Chinese officials have publicly expressed an interest in an international currency. This is described by Chinese specialists as a sign that they are less confident than they used to be in the value and the reliability of the U.S. dollar. European countries have resisted your calls to spend more on economic stimulus.

I wonder, sir, as a candidate who ran concerned about the image of the United States globally, how comfortable you are with the Chinese government, run by communists, less confident than they used to be in the U.S. dollar, and European governments, some of the center-left, some of them socialist, who say you're asking them to spend too much?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, first of all, I haven't asked them to do anything. What I've suggested is -- is that all of us are going to have to take steps in order to lift the economy. We don't want a situation in which some countries are making extraordinary efforts and other countries aren't, with the hope that somehow the countries that are making those important steps lift everybody up.

And so somebody's got to take leadership. It's not just me, by the way. I was with Kevin Rudd, prime minister of Australia, today, who was very forceful in suggesting that countries around the world, those with the capacity to do so, take the steps that are needed to fill this enormous hole in global demand. Gordon Brown, when he came to visit me, said the exact same thing…

Admittedly, the purpose of the endorsement was defensive: Obama was using the example of Rudd’s economic policies to shield himself from criticism on the same issue. Nevertheless, there are few more prominent media forums in the US system than a bells-and-whistles presidential press conference, so the PM will probably go to bed tonight a happy man.

So Robert Kagan believes Barack Obama's election heralds no change to US foreign policy. Under the new administration, he argues in The Washington Post, 'the basic goals and premises of US policy have not shifted.' He ends his article with the ironic cry: 'Viva la revolucion!'

Kagan's article is quite misleading. Of course, any country's foreign policy always contains strong elements of continuity, generated by its history, geography, wealth, population and position in the international system. But within that broad structure of continuity, changes of government cause significant alterations to international policies (or why else would someone like Kagan himself have signed up as an adviser to John McCain?)
 
This past presidential election is certainly an example of a foreign policy change election. As I argued recently: 

Shortly after his inauguration, [Obama] instructed the US military to draw up a plan for the withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq and set in train the closure of the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. The Obama administration will bring a new approach to Afghanistan, end America's macabre dance of climate change denial, scepticism and delay, engage directly with US adversaries, interact strategically rather than tactically with the UN, sever Bush's link between freedom and force and do all this with global goodwill rather than opprobrium.
 
Will the US decommission its army and adopt a foreign policy that is appropriate for, say, a small Scandinavian country? No. But compared with most historical precedents this is most definitely change we can believe in.

Apart from being wrong, Kagan's argument is also familiar. In 2000, he published another op-ed in The Post titled, spookily, 'Vive what difference?'. In that piece he asked gloomily: 'When it comes to international affairs, is there really any difference between Bush and Gore?' Kagan seemed doubtful at the time, but the answer to the question is surely 'yes'.

Very early on, on issues from arms negotiations to climate change, George W Bush's presidency acquired a unilateral cast which has never been detectable in Al Gore's behaviour. And although we can never say for sure, it seems highly unlikely, based on his contemporaneous comments and his worldview, that Gore would have responded to 9/11 by invading not only Afghanistan but Iraq. Surely Kagan would agree that the invasion of Iraq has had non-trivial consequences for the US and the world!

Like Bush in his first term, Obama is shifting policy in interesting and meaningful ways. The process may not constitute a revolution but it is important — and it should certainly not be waved away.

Last year I raised my eyebrows at the price Washington is paying for a new fleet of helicopters for carting around POTUS, or the President of the United States. At Barack Obama's fiscal responsibility summit today, Senator John McCain, who has a long record of being a budgetary hawk as well as a military one, took up the issue.

Kudos to McCain. This is the first time I can recall any significant American political player raising (albeit in good humour) the astronomical cost of housing, transporting and protecting US presidents in the manner to which they've grown accustomed. And kudos to Obama for the lightness of his touch in response: somehow he comes out of the exchange looking just as virtuous as McCain (not that he's likely to give up Marine One any time soon).

A Boxing Day op-ed by Karl Rove in The Wall Street Journal stirred up a lot of chit-chat here in the US. Rove revealed (not for the first time) that he and his former boss, President George W Bush, engage in an annual competition to see who can read the most books. The op-ed is a perfect storm of vanity and loyalty, in which Rove preens under the guise of praising his boss.

Rove reports that Bush read 40 books in 2008 (compared to his own 64), including biographies of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S Grant, lots of history and the Bible (although this year there is nothing as avant-garde as Albert Camus’s The Stranger, which made the president’s 2006 list).

Rove’s op-ed has been cited by conservatives who dispute the conventional wisdom that Bush is self-satisfied and incurious. On the other hand, The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen argued that the contents of the list revealed Bush’s intellectual weakness, not his strength: More...

I have to confess that this year I read more reports, articles and speeches than I did books. Many of them had a common protagonist: a skinny young politician with a funny name. You get the drift.

I did, however, find time for Le Carré's masterful Karla trilogy, and I have his new novel (which critics have hailed as his return to Smileyesque form), A Most Wanted Man, sitting beside my bed. I hoovered up one or two Lord Peter Wimsey novels by Dorothy L. Sayers, and I enjoyed The Road to Cana, the second in Anne Rice's 'Christ the Lord' trilogy. As readers of The Interpreter and the FT know, I thought Ted Sorensen's autobiography, Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History, was a remarkable piece of history. I'm very much looking forward to the latest from Australia's Sorensen, Graham Freudenberg: Churchill and Australia.

In anticipation of Obama's inaugural address, I'm reading Fred Kaplan's Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer.

So Pete Speer thinks anyone who nominates Barack Obama as their leader of the year needs to ‘sober up’.

Pete’s right, of course. Obama achieved nothing at all in 2008, apart from coming from way behind to win the most impressive electoral victory in decades, in the process of which defeating the vaunted Clinton and Republican political machines; electrifying much of the world; and running the most magnanimous and disciplined transition in living memory.

In any case, Pete may wish to cancel his subscription to TIME.

I am pretty dubious about 'celebrities without borders' who involve themselves in politics and international relations. So I've decided to kick off a very occasional feature in which I post instances of this kind of celebrity shamelessness.

I'll start with Fran Drescher, the Nanny who's decided to clean up the House. Well, not the House, actually, but the Senate. Drescher would like to take Hillary Clinton's seat in the US Senate, and showed her wares last night on Larry King Live in one of the most awful interviews* it has ever been my misfortune to view. Watch this and weep for the Republic.

*Ed note: Link fixed.

In August 2007, President-elect Barack Obama promised that, in the first 100 days of his administration, he would ‘travel to a major Islamic forum’ and give a speech on Islam and terrorism. ‘I will make clear’, he promised, ‘that we are not at war with Islam, that we will stand with those who are willing to stand up for their future, and that we need their effort to defeat the prophets of hate and violence…My message will be clear: “You matter to us. Your future is our future. And our moment is now.”’

In Monday’s New York Times, I argued Obama should give this speech in Indonesia. There are strong cases to be made for other locations, of course. But when I look at The Audacity of Hope, with its rich description of Indonesia, I’d be surprised if he goes elsewhere to deliver it.

In the FT yesterday I argued that, although Washington foreign policy discussions these days are full of baseball metaphors, President-elect Barack Obama should take his lead instead from a more complex and demanding game: cricket. It seems to me the invasion of Iraq demonstrated a baseball player’s mentality. President George W Bush thought that with a single swing he could fix all the problems of the Middle East at once.

It turns out that I spoke too soon: Niall Ferguson from Harvard has reminded me that, on at least one occasion, Bush has played cricket too (see below). Mr Bush is not, of course, the only member of the coalition of the willing to try his hand at cricket.

When Tony Blair was appointed the Quartet’s representative to the Middle East last year, I was cautiously supportive of the pick. I thought the appointment was as much about Tony as it was about the Middle East, and I was troubled by the unseemly haste in rushing to make the appointment before he vacated Downing Street.

But I couldn’t completely agree with the groans from the much of the world’s media. Yes, the odds were clearly stacked against Blair – but I believed he’d bring energy and optimism to a conflict in need of both. The risks involved in the appointment were mainly to his reputation.

In the fifteen months since, I’ve wondered occasionally whether I made the wrong call. Certainly, it’s hard to point to much substantive difference that Blair has made. However, a speech he delivered yesterday in Washington, which has been pinging around policy and political circles here and in the Middle East, has confirmed me in my initial view. I found it thoughtful and compelling – one insider told me it’s the best short synthesis of the situation on the ground he has read.

President-elect Barack Obama is likely to move quickly to appoint a US national as special envoy to the Middle East. The US has a unique role to play in the resolution of the conflict, and there are outstanding candidates for the job. But given the prestige that Tony Blair continues to enjoy, the international community would be well advised to keep the former PM in the mix as well. There’s more than enough work to go around.

Sometimes you simply have to feel sorry for George W. Bush. Today I watched Barack Obama give another well-received press conference in which he tapped former chairman of the Fed, Paul Volcker, to head up a new Economic Recovery Advisory Board.

Then the coverage clicked over to the current incumbent, who was... pardoning a turkey for Thanksgiving. Bush's consolation must be that this time next year, Obama will be the one handing down the pardon. Not even Obama can make this particular tradition look anything but lame.

President-elect Barack Obama has recorded two video appearances in the last few days that are worth a click.

His first post-election interview on 60 Minutes is enjoyable because it points to a future when it will be a pleasure to listen to the president of the United States. I know it’s old hat to complain about George W Bush’s lack of verbal fluency. But I did enjoy the unfamiliar experience of observing a presidential figure construct a complicated argument, talk about important issues without falling back on buzz words, and drop in some genuine humour, as Obama did with his self-deprecating reference to Harold’s Chicken Shop. This truly is a change we need.

Obama’s remarks to US governors on climate change were impressive for a different reason. Washington chatter holds that America’s economic problems will prevent it from taking major action on climate change. Obama’s comments leave a different impression. They are certainly worlds away from the macabre dance of climate change denial, skepticism and finally delay performed by the Bush Administration.

It turns out that not even Barack Obama is perfect. Sure, he won an historic election victory. Yes, he gave a cracker of a victory speech. OK, his transition to power is humming along with the usual deadly effectiveness.

But I am sorry to pass on the news that Obama’s Secret Service code-name is…‘Renegade’.

Sorry, but that’s all wrong. Does Obama not realize that Renegade was a dreadful '90s TV series starring Lorenzo Lamas as a Harley-riding bounty hunter with hair extensions? Renegade would have been a fine code-name for, say, Chuck Norris, had Mike Huckabee won the Republican nomination and appointed his wing-chun wingman as his running-mate. But Obama?

Secret Service code-names customarily evoke the candidate in some way: Ronald Reagan was ‘Rawhide’; Jimmy Carter was ‘Deacon’; John McCain was ‘Phoenix’; Todd Palin was ‘Driller’. So you might have expected Obama to go for, say, ‘Jazz’, or ‘Jordan’ or, in light of this pic, ‘Matrix’  – but not Renegade.

I do not accept the excuse that the names are chosen for the president by the Service and the US military. Are they telling us that the commander-in-chief can bring bombs raining down on any part of the earth but cannot select a cool moniker for himself? In any case, that claim is undermined by this Wall Street Journal report that Al Gore’s code-name changed conveniently from the prosaic ‘Sawhorse’ to the far looser ‘Sundance’.

Mr President-Elect: it is within your power to make this right. Renegade: this simply can not stand.

It’s been an exhilarating couple of days to be in the United States, as a great victory was won by the most gifted presidential candidate in decades and America demonstrated again why it has such a hold on the world’s imagination. I described some of my feelings at the end of this interview on election night.

Both the victorious candidate and the defeated one gave very fine speeches, from Chicago and Phoenix respectively. I thought it was notable that Obama underplayed the significance of his race whereas McCain emphasized it – which was both counterintuitive and correct in both cases.

John McCain made a classy exit from the presidential stage: his speech was serious, patriotic and generous. This was a return to the old McCain, after the nonsense of Bill Ayers and socialism and everything else towards the end of his campaign. This McCain could well turn out to be one of Obama’s best friends in the Senate. More...

John McCain probably felt he needed Dick Cheney's endorsement like a hole in the head — but now he's got it. Barack Obama made hay with the announcement, congratulating McCain and asserting that he'd worked hard to get it, by voting with President Bush 90% of the time.

But I was intrigued to hear what Cheney had to say about McCain's VP pick, Governor Sarah Palin. He called her 'a running mate with executive talent, toughness and common sense'. I wonder, though, if Cheney really believes this, in his 3am moments (assuming he has them).

I'm sure he approves of her political leanings on the war against terror and the roles played by good and evil in the affairs of humankind. But whatever you think of Cheney, he's a person of real substance. He has seen everything and he knows everyone. He has massively expanded the powers and influence of the Office of the Vice President. So I'm intrigued to know what he really thinks about the prospect of being replaced in that job by a complete novice who has plainly never found the time over the past decade to acquaint herself with the most important issues facing the United States.

In an article published last week in the new online magazine The Daily Beast, I argue that despite being a McCain adviser, Henry Kissinger really ought to vote for Obama on Tuesday, since he would be a run a more realistic foreign policy than McCain. Obama’s pragmatism was apparent in his 2002 speech against the Iraq war:

I don’t oppose all wars… What I am opposed to is a dumb war… a rash war, a war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics… I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military is a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history. I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.

That’s not to say Obama would be a Kissingerian realist, however, moving the geopolitical chess pieces around the board with an icy indifference to the human costs of his moves. More...

In a recent post, Sam Roggeveen criticised Barack Obama’s protectionism. It’s one of the topics I address in the Lowy Institute Analysis I released a couple of days ago, ‘Hope or Glory? The Presidential Election, U.S. Foreign Policy and Australia’.

There’s no question Obama’s free market rhetoric has slipped during the presidential campaign. He was highly critical of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) during the primary season, labelling it ‘a mistake’. He opposes the pending South Korea and Colombia FTAs in their current form and warns that FTAs should be required to meet tougher environmental and labour standards.

By contrast, McCain is remarkably consistent free trader. His boast that he is ‘the biggest free marketer and free trader that you will ever see’ is not an idle one: he may never have seen a free trade agreement he couldn’t vote for. He defends free trade even to its enemies, telling autoworkers in Michigan (a Republican primary that he went on to lose): ‘Some of the jobs that have left the state of Michigan are not coming back. They are not. And I am sorry to tell you that.’ More...