Candidate Obama on Foreign Policy

In the Presidential race, some noise has been made over the last few days about President Bush’s comparison of negotiation with terrorists and radicals to the appeasement of Nazi Germany. Obama apparently thinks that the President Bush was talking about him and has stated that he is willing to debate McCain on foreign policy “any place, any time”.

John Bolton has written an editorial in the Wall Street Journal where he suggests that McCain “should accept that challenge today.” Bolton goes on to state why Obama’s foreign policy idea of negotiating with all our enemies is bad:

Quote below the fold:

Negotiation is not a policy. It is a technique. Saying that one favors negotiation with, say, Iran, has no more intellectual content than saying one favors using a spoon. For what? Under what circumstances? With what objectives? On these specifics, Mr. Obama has been consistently sketchy.

Bolton points out that negotiation has costs as well as benefits. In particular some of the costs include giving the other organization legitimacy, consuming the precious time of the President (if done as suggested by Obama), and giving the enemy time to develop their weapons.

Another cost was pointed out by one of the Fox News pundits (I can’t remember which). Obama is pointing out that both Reagan and Kennedy met with the Russians. But when Khrushchev met with President Kennedy, he left thinking that Kennedy was weak. This negotiation led to the Cuban missile crisis.

An Obama Presidency could have similar foreign policy implications.