How Will The Next President Secure America?

            In less than a month, American voters will decide on the person who will lead, and attempt to secure, our nation through the next four years.  It will, of course, be either John McCain or Barack Obama.  What sort of national security leadership will each of them  provide?  While both of these men are honorable people and, I believe, will do what they believe is best for our country, their experience and personality will lead them to different leadership styles.

            McCain is known for being passionate, creative, impulsive and a bit hot tempered.  His worldview has been tempered by his military experience and five-years in a Vietnamese prison.  There he demonstrated a powerful resolve and a will to persevere in the most difficult circumstances. 

His campaign rhetoric makes me believe that he sees the world in terms of friends and enemies.  I would think the focus of his foreign policy would be to stand by those he sees as friends and directly confront those he sees as enemies.  Witness his gung-ho support for Georgian President, Saakashvili, and palpable distaste for Russian Prime Minister, Putin.  McCain would attempt, I believe, to build America’s prestige through the extension of our military power throughout the world.  He would bring friends closer and isolate enemies further.       

            This style of leadership may well result in international confrontations and even military conflicts.  This, it seems to me, would be a continuation of the hard-edged foreign policy we have seen for the past eight years.  It has not worked particularly well and it seems unlikely that it will work in the future. 

            Obama’s experience has been as a community organizer.  His focus was to work with people, even those with whom he disagrees.   He would attempt to bring about America’s security through diplomacy and negotiation.  The caution for Obama is that he must not allow a desire for negotiation to morph into appeasement. 

I believe, he would attempt to deal with the threat of Islamic terrorism by containing it rather than try for some total victory, which might lead America into yet another war.   Obama says he wants to build America’s strength from the bottom up, by building its economy. 

            Which style would work best, over the next several years?  All we can do is look to history and hope to learn from it.  The United States has always done best around the world when we exerted economic and moral leadership.  Since the end of WWII, this kind of leadership has guided America through international difficulties.  In the past eight years, under George Bush, we seem to have lost our way.  America has become known as a nation that starts wars, rather than a nation the tries to end them.  People of the world see us now as a nation that tortures its prisoners of war, rather than a world leader in the humane treatment of POWs.  It will be many years before America recovers it prestige in the world.  For us to do so, will require a cool leadership hand, rather than a hot one.