It’s frustrating to see liberal hawk Oliver Kamm recite John McCain’s talking points on Obama’s supposed foreign policy naïvete. The argument, as we know, centers around Obama’s assertion during the July 2007 YouTube debate that he’d be willing to meet with hostile foreign leaders.
Yes, this was an answer that I criticized myself. I still think it was hasty and unnecessary to commit to such a position in the context of a primary debate, and indeed, Obama’s answer has become the first thing the GOP is trying to beat him on. It’s been a long campaign since then, and Obama has done much to elaborate his views on foreign policy, as at the AIPAC speech yesterday, where he spoke of “aggressive, principled diplomacy without self-defeating preconditions, but with a clear-eyed understanding of our interests.” Obama has people like Susan Rice and Anthony Lake on his team. These aren’t people ready to sell the U.S. down the river.
Kamm, however, approvingly cites torture advocate Charles Krauthammer, who attacks Obama for a “willingness to undertake a worldwide freshman-year tyrants tour.” This is a willful caricature. There is no evidence whatsoever that Obama intends to take such a “tour.” Nor has he offered up apologetics for dictators in any way. Anyone who thinks Obama is soft on this subject ought to recall his smackdown of Dennis Kucinich at the April 26, 2007 debate, which I discussed here. (Kucinich, for his part, participated in a state-controlled propaganda exercise on Syrian TV.)
Fred Kaplan offers further useful insight and a staunch defense of Obama’s position, arguing that it makes perfect sense for the post-Cold War world, particularly after Bush has done so much to diminish America’s leverage.
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