I watched the Obama - Romney debate last night on foreign policy. I didn't catch onto Romney's strategy until I listened to the PBS commentators afterwards: Romney was trying to be calm, agreeable, less aggressive, even the hurt puppy, to appeal to women. He wanted to come across as someone who isn't scary, isn't ready to go to war at the drop of a hat, in order to appeal to women who evidently worry more about that than men. (And perhaps that's true).I'm voting for Obama anyway, but I have to say I thought he came across as more personally connected to foreign policy than to some of the other issues they've discussed. (Except health care). I was thinking about why it appeared this way to me, and I've concluded this: So much of the news in the last four years has been economic: to tax or not, to bail out or not, to spend or not, the price of houses, how many people are out of work, the percentage of increase or decrease in unemployment and home sales . . . numbers, numbers, numbers. This isn't completely the case, of course: some news stories focus on human examples of these economic realities. But more than ever in the last four years, I find I can't listen to the news on the radio for more than 5 or 10 minutes, because it's so much about numbers and financial institutions and strategy.
Obama seemed very personally connected to foreign policy last night, because he's been living it the last four years. He's been living all the issues--economic, environmental, health care--but health care is (at least in the news, often when it's discussed) completely intertwined with money, too.
But, as I was pondering why the president seemed to take all the issues so personally last night, why he glowered at Romney as he realized that Romney was just going to repeat everything he said about foreign policy because he didn't want to appear scary--as I was thinking about this, I realized that foreign policy, more directly than any other issue a president tackles, involves people dying. President Obama--anyone who's been in that office after four years--has seen people die on his watch, die as a direct result of him sending them to war, or of the results of what other countries do because of our relationships with them. People dying is not necessarily the US's fault, and there's not necessarily anything the president can do to prevent our citizens, our soldiers, or other countries' citizens from dying, but that's very often what the stakes are in foreign policy.
I thought of all the students and faculty I've worked with, from the Middle East and all over the world, and how they would react to the unmistakable assumed superiority of the US that both candidates projected. How we arbitrarily say that Iran must never have nuclear weapons and Pakistan, who already has 100, can't have any more. Nobody mentioned India, an enormous presence (and nuclear-armed too, right?) I understand that these issues aren't so simple; that the nuclear arms race was called a race for a reason, and I can accept arbitrariness in who's nuclear-armed and who isn't.
But do WE always get to decide? Really, the US gets to be the decider of these things? I guess a candidate for the US presidency can't say otherwise. And if I'm honest, having grown up in this country it's hard for me to imagine the US as not having some kind of major influence in the world. I just wish it didn't have to be voiced in such starkly simple and arbitrary terms; that Obama didn't have to say, "If I am president, Iran will not have a nuclear weapon." And Romney to say "Me too, and I'll even cripple them some more." At least, to me, the debate brought out Obama's decisiveness in an area of experience that Romney just doesn't have. In that way, it seems a bit unfair even to debate foreign policy, when one of the debaters has been in charge of it for the last four years. It made me think of the sobering influence a US president has over the lives of people. That foreign policy means life or death at times, and it's complex and messy and important.
No comments:
Post a Comment