Obama the Realist on Foreign Policy

UPDATE: I cannot determine why the line breaks are screwed up in this post. I've scrubbed the blockquote through notepad, edited it in HTML mode to remove any hidden tags, and nothing works. I like a tidy if cluttered blog, this is driving me nuts. Any suggestions?



In a recent issue of Newsweek, Fareed Zakaria contrasted teh foreign policies of McCain and Obama, finding the latter the realist and the former the starry eyed idealist.

Comparing the two candidate's approaches to Russia and China, Zakaria writes:


Obama's response to McCain's proposals on Russia and China could have been
drafted by Henry Kissinger or Brent Scowcroft. We need to cooperate with both
countries in order to solve significant global problems, he told me last week,
citing nuclear-proliferation issues with Russia and economic ones with China.
The distinction between Obama and McCain on this point is important. The single
largest strategic challenge facing the United States in the decades ahead is to
draw in the world's new rising powers and make them stakeholders in the global
economic and political order.Russia and China will be the hardest because they
are large and have different political systems and ideological approaches to the
world. Yet the benefits of having them inside the tent are obvious. Without some
degree of great-power cooperation, global peace and stability becomes a far more
fragile prospect.

My emphasis. And my take: McCain is the reckless one. Obama is the conservative here.