We should be creating a diplomatic partnership. It will help make America a safer place to live in. Another thing that the Obama administration should be focusing on is helping eradicate global hunger. The more people that are left starving, the more people there are for the Taliban to potentially recruit. If all it takes is giving them food, shelter and schools for their children (which are things they really need) why wouldn't you want to pledge an allegience to them? The Borgen Project (www.borgenproject.org) has some great ideas to help reduce poverty and make developed countries a better place to live in.
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Holding Pattern
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Israel and the Palestinians. Every president is urged to commit time and clout to settling this long-running conflict. But Israel won't have a government able to commit to anything until well after next February's elections—and perhaps not even then. Nor do the Palestinians have a leadership that unites its warring factions. Obama is off the hook for months—time enough to decide if he really wants to embroil the U.S. in this quagmire yet again.
Russia.President Dmitry Medvedev, in brusquely threatening to deploy medium-range missiles in Kaliningrad unless the new administration abandons plans for missile defenses in central Europe, has just done Obama a huge favor. No American president could possibly back down in the face of so crude a threat, and no government in Europe would want him to. At the same time, the more Medvedev threatens, the more he undercuts Russia's efforts at rapprochement with its former satellites. Obama's response? If Medvedev doesn't want U.S. missile defenses in central Europe, he and Putin must help wring a deal from Iran.
Venezuela.President Chavez would bask in the status conferred by some "initiative" by the new administration. But the United States wants nothing from Chavez that he is remotely likely to deliver—political liberalization at home, for example. Absent that, Chavez remains a blusterer best left to the other governments of the region to contain.
Surely there must be some foreign or national-security matter on which an incoming Obama administration could make a big splash?
Guantánamo is the obvious choice. Obama has pledged to close the detention camp. Certainly that would be the single most potent symbol of a "fresh start" by a new administration. Yet even here Obama will face problems. The Bush administration has been quietly cutting the numbers at Gitmo for a couple of years. A sizeable fraction of those still held are, on the available evidence, seriously determined Al Qaeda members. If Gitmo closes, what should be done with them?
© 2008
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