Week 1, Item 2

By Jared Behrend

McCain foreign policy points at September 26 Presidential Debate

In outlining his ideas of the American role in Iran, Senator McCain invokes the Holocaust to warn of the possibility of this occurring again if a nuclear weapon-equipped Iran rises in the Middle East. He insists that a UN Security Council resolution is difficult because of Russia’s presence in that forum, and sees the solution being a “League of Democracies” in which “a group of countries that share common interests, common values, common ideals, they also control a lot of the world's economic power… impose significant meaningful, painful sanctions on the Iranians that I think could have a beneficial effect.” An important question to raise is whether there is significant support from other democracies. Some countries he names as potentially being part of the League, “with the French, with the British, with the Germans” have shown much hesitance, mainly the French and Germans, in American goals and aggressions in the Middle East and throughout the world. Assuming that democracies share common ideas on foreign policy is flat-out wrong and the “League of Democracies” would just become another “Coalition of the Willing” as the American-led invasion of Iraq was billed. That is, it would mainly be the United States’ own coalition. What McCain’s plan leaves out is the potential multinational support the U.S. might receive if McCain’s plan reached out to non-democratic countries in support of economic sanctions on Iran. As raised in class, an important question to ask is what countries the U.S. sees as being “Democratic” and in what way do they judge the “democraticness” of a state.

Full transcript of September 26th's debate available at
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=78691