By Ryan Hanson

Last Fridays presidential debate touched a lot on foreign policies, but the one specific topic was how the United States are going to deal with Iran and their nuclear proliferation, which just happens to be our group topic. Throughout the debate Senator McCain and Senator Obama shared a lot of similar views, until it came down to discussing Iran. Obama seemed to have more of a liberalist perspective compared to McCain’s more realist ideas. One interesting point that Obama made was that Iraq was one of Iran’s biggest enemies and the Bush Administration took Iraq out. So that means we just gave Iran more confidence to build up on their nuclear weapons.
Where the two candidates disagreed the most was on meeting with Iran to talk about their nuclear plans. McCain wouldn’t want to sit down with President Ahmadinejad at all, Obama said he would sit down and talk with him because he mentioned that the ‘no talking’ idea with North Korea doesn’t seem to be working right now, so why would the United States continue that plan with Iran. McCain said that we should team up with ONLY democratic states to impose sanctions on Iran. I have to agree with Obama on this topic because Obama said we need more countries then just the democratic ones. We need China and Russia because if we went on without those countries then Iran can just work with them, and who knows if Iran wouldn’t be able to get a hold of more nuclear supplies through Russia.
It was a very interesting debate and both candidates made their points made. Senator Obama did a great job and we will have to see how his vice presidential candidate does Thursday night on his debate.