McCain, Obama spar over foreign policy
WASHINGTON – Sen. John McCain stepped up his assault on Sen. Barack Obama’s foreign policy credentials at a rally in Miami Tuesday, criticizing Obama’s willingness to talk to Cuban president Raul Castro and other hostile foreign leaders without preconditions. But McCain’s argument was undercut when a 2006 video emerged of former secretary of state James Baker, a prominent McCain supporter, saying that “talking to an enemy is not in my view appeasement.”
The furious exchanges between the presidential candidates were prompted by President Bush’s statement to the Israeli parliament last week that negotiating with “terrorists and radicals” such as Iran embodied “the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.” But the dispute underscores an emerging theme on the campaign trail, with McCain, R-Ariz., stressing his national security credentials and painting Obama as weak and inexperienced, and with Obama, D-Ill., pushing a message of change and seeking to tar McCain as a Bush clone.
On Monday, McCain told members of the National Restaurant Association that Obama fails to understand “basic realities of international relations.” McCain said Obama’s willingness to talk with Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad without preconditions during his first year as president would only embolden “an implacable foe of the United States.”
Tuesday, speaking to a Cuban American audience, McCain singled out Obama’s willingness to meet Castro. “These steps would send the worst possible signal to Cuba’s dictators: There is no need to undertake fundamental reforms; they can simply wait for a unilateral change in U.S. policy,” McCain said. “I believe we should give hope to the Cuban people, not to the Castro regime.”
Obama, meanwhile, has stuck to his position that the president should be willing to talk with the United States’ enemies as part of a return to a more open and ambitious use of diplomacy, though last week he clarified that there would be lower-level contacts before any presidential meeting. On the campaign trail, Obama cites President Nixon’s opening of U.S. relations with China and President Reagan’s negotiations with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev as examples he would emulate.
The Obama campaign also pointed to previous statements from prominent Republicans such as former secretaries of state Colin Powell and Henry Kissinger, as well as Sens. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., and Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., in making the case for direct talks with Iran.
Moreover, in an Oct. 6, 2006, interview on Fox News’s “Hannity & Colmes” that began circulating on the Internet this week, Baker dismissed the notion that talking with enemies – even state sponsors of terrorism – is any sort of appeasement.
“You don’t just talk to your friends; you talk to your enemies, as well,” an animated Baker said. “Diplomacy involves talking to your enemies. You don’t reward your enemies necessarily by talking to them if you are tough and you know what you are doing. You don’t appease them. Talking to an enemy is not, in my view, appeasement.”