August 14th, 2008 by Matt

In a Newsweek essay, Fareed Zakaria advises John McCain and Barack Obama not to reflexively reverse all of the Bush administration’s foreign policy actions.  Zakaria makes the argument that Bush’s second-term foreign policy has frequently been “sensible” and “mainstream”, compared with his first-term foreign policy behavior, and thus neither candidate should dismiss it out-of-hand.  Zakaria cites Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and the Mideast peace process as areas where Bush policy is now “less vulnerable to attack” due to shifts and evolutions in the correct direction.  Zakaria addresses Bush’s “freedom agenda”, but only in relation to Africa, where he decries the administration for implementing an old Middle East style protocol of propping up dictators only because they have “learned to mouth the language of the global War on Terror”. Zakaria also offers areas where the new president should strongly attempt to distance himself from the Bush administration, including with regard to actions that have given much of the world the impression that the U.S. is anti-Muslim.

Posted in Election 08, US foreign policy, US politics |