Obama, McCain, and the world

If you're a foreign policy wonk, the concentration on domestic issues in the general election race may have you parched for information on the candidates' international views. But a couple of recent pieces offered some valuable insights as to how Barack Obama and John McCain see the world.

In this week's Newsweek, Evan Thomas discussed how each candidate plans to use the themes of Vietnam and World War II, respectively, to outline their approach to Iraq and the War on Terror:

"McCain will exploit the Munich-appeasement cliché; through his loyalists and by implication, if not in so many words, he will likely portray Barack Obama as a softy and vaguely "un-American." Obama and his surrogates, in turn, are likely to cast McCain as a once brave but now slightly unhinged former POW who has stubbornly determined to stay in Iraq in a war without end. Vote for Obama, the Republicans say, and you may get another Munich; vote for McCain, the Democrats say, and you may get another Vietnam."

Sticking with the Newsweek theme, last month Fareed Zakaria, the editor of the magazine's international edition, analyzed the candidates' differing world views on PRI's The World podcast:

"Fundamentally McCain seems to be envisioning a world, a very hostile world in which we face what he calls this transcendent existential evil of Islamic extremism, autocracies which must be fought, and Obama sees a world in which you have lots of different kinds of regimes, but there are areas where we have common interests and we should try to pursue them... In that sense Barack Obama represents more of the kind of old fashioned tradition of Republican hard-headed problem solving and McCain has become the Wilsonian, a kind of armed Wilsonian, a kind of belligerent Wilsonian, but still very much somebody looking at the world through a highly ideological prism rather than a practical one."

Listen to the interview here.