Foreign Policy Questions for Debate

Whenever Senators Barack Obama and John McCain ultimately square off for their first debate on U.S. foreign policy, the terrain will almost certainly be familiar: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the low-level war in Pakistan's tribal belt, the resurgence of Russia and Iran's nuclear ambitions. Yet it's the issues flying below the radar that could just as easily consume their prospective presidencies and define their legacies.

To their mutual credit, the campaigns have grappled with many of the pressing global flash-points, said Derek Chollet, Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security. "There's certainly been a more thorough foreign policy discussion in this campaign, partly because events are forcing themselves onto the table."

Yet often lost in the back-and-forth over the crisis of the moment are big-picture issues of how America positions herself in the world after the eight eventful years of the Bush Administration. As former U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke observed in Foreign Affairs, "the next president will inherit a more difficult opening day set of international problems than any of his predecessors have since at least the end of World War II."

Perhaps the biggest challenge facing the candidates is to articulate when, and under what circumstances, they believe the U.S. should use military force, said Robert Hunter, former U.S. Ambassador to NATO and a Senior Advisor at the RAND Corporation.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. has deployed her military around the globe at an unprecedented pace, but with little evident coherence. Some perceived threats, like Saddam Hussein's Iraq, were attacked directly. Others, like Iran and North Korea, were not. Some humanitarian catastrophes (in Somalia and the Balkans) provoked a response, others (like Rwanda) did not.

The candidates need to define an organizing construct of how the U.S. would involve itself militarily in a failed state, suggested Stephen Flanagan, Senior Vice President and Director of the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "What is the metric? When do we become engaged? Is it a question of vital interest, or certain humanitarian or moral obligations?"

Do the candidates believe, as Secretary of State Rice has asserted, that failed states even pose a direct threat to the U.S.? Senator Obama, and his chief foreign policy advisor Susan Rice, have spoken out about the genocide in Darfur and the need for more robust U.S. action. Clearly, the violence in Darfur has wrought a terrible humanitarian toll – but has it endangered the lives of Americans or any core American interests? Has the violence in, say, the Congo given rise to any of the threats said to emanate from failed states: global pandemics or international terrorism? Would the costs of intervening in either of those failed states be worth the benefit? Do policy-makers in Washington understand the tribal and ethnic dynamics in Sudan better than they did in pre-war Iraq?

More broadly, should the U.S. consider her "interests" and her "values" as distinct, or inviolable, categories?

Related to when to use force is the equally pressing question of how our forces are sustained. Even before the financial crises and ensuing bail-outs, taxpayers were on the hook for two multi-billion dollar nation building projects in Iraq and Afghanistan. Bracketing out these costs (as the Bush Administration has done through the use of supplemental funds) still leaves a Pentagon budget that has grown sharply over the last seven years.

"The defense budget today is about double what it was seven years ago," said John Pike, Director of Global Security.org. "Do we keep it there, or do we declare a peace dividend?"

The defense budget is a looming "train wreck" for the next administration, Chollet added. "It's going to consume them because these increases can't be sustained, especially because both candidates have ambitious priorities, like energy security, that need to be balanced against defense spending."

The U.S. plans to spend $515.4 billion for defense in the 2009 financial year (not counting expenditures in Iraq and Afghanistan). To date, both candidates have shied away from anything resembling a "peace dividend" but have instead promised to find and eliminate "wasteful spending" (fish meet barrel). Obama specifically wishes to pare back missile defense and the Army's Future Combat Systems modernization effort, while McCain has promised a more generic "scrub" of the budget.

Yet both candidates have made a costly promise: to expand the size of American ground forces. All of which raises the question of how the candidates propose to use these forces. Do they view the Army and Marines as war fighters, peace keepers or both? Should we "transform" our military into a constabulary force that can deal with future occupations and counter-insurgencies, or should we return to the Rumsfeld model of building an army to destroy nations, not rebuild them? Is Iraq the future of American wars, or do we need to gird ourselves for more conventional conflicts?

More importantly, given the evident budgetary strains, should America re-think some of its defense commitments – many of which are legacy obligations from the Cold War?

Americans are increasingly weary of playing global super cop, said Christopher Preble, Director of Foreign Policy Studies at the CATO Institute. "There is a growing recognition that this is costly, dangerous and difficult, and our allies are less capable of defending themselves and more dependent on us," he said.

New alliances, particularly with India, will also consume the next administration. The Bush Administration is racing to get approval on a historic and controversial nuclear agreement with India that will have serious ramifications for the incoming administration as it attempts to navigate relations with other powers, said Lawrence Korb, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. "It has already complicated our relationship with Pakistan."

That relationship, it bears reminding, was barely on the national radar when George W. Bush first ran for office. Indeed, in November 1999, Bush was unable to name the leader of Pakistan. His spokesperson at the time, Karen Hughes, dismissed the journalistic stunt as irrelevant. Yet a mere nine months into his first term, nearly everyone in America knew who Pervez Musharraf was and why he mattered.

The incoming administration will face a litany of foreign policy challenges beyond the headline issues that tend to dominate a campaign. If we could pause, if only for a moment, from the finer points of lipstick and pigs, we might just learn something about how the next Leader of the Free World intends to deal with them.