Leaning towards Obama

If Barak Obama keeps thinking in these more deeply-considered ways and in directions that could move us out of our foreign policy ruts, I may vote for him.

This is an excellent article on Obama's foreign policy thinking and the campaign by James Traub in the International Herald Tribune today.

Obama's guide to leading a "post-post-9/11" America

I need to hear him say that he'll stick with the war until the Iraqis say they are ready for us to leave. But the debate is shifting in that direction, anyway, I believe, so this may become a mute point.

And can I say that I have grown increasingly disappointed with Joe Nye over the course of this war. He says he didn't support the war up front. The New York Times says different. I'm less concerned with that than I am with the fact that everything I've ever heard him say on behalf of Hillary Clinton has lacked much real substance. Which wouldn't bother me so much if Hillary Clinton, herself, had something more substantive to say about foreign policy.

But both of them seem to be tacking cautiously with more attention to a Democratic victory than to a more effective and thoughtful international policy. And that is a sure sign that you are going to fuck up. Because you're more focussed on your own ambitions than you are on doing a good job. And that is what bugs me about Hillary Clinton.

And anytime that you have a leader who prioritizes power over knowing better what to do with that power, you know you're in trouble.

It's not a good sign for an international policy thinker when a political candidate, like Obama, is thinking more out loud and more substantively than you are. And it's a good sign for Obama that so many international policy thinkers in and outside of America are favorable to what I have to say are, generally - with exception for this thinking on the war, which has not impressed me - refreshingly open-minded and thoughtful.

And his skepticism about the use of force articulated in this article is exactly the kind of thing I need to hear from an American head of state, right now, given the American propensity to bully the world on whatever issues Americans face, right now.

None of the candidates are thinking as broadly and with as much willingness to question and rethink their own conventional wisdom as well as the conventional wisdom of others as I want. But I do have to say that Obama is doing so more than the other candidates, even as I'm disappointed with his shortsightedness on the war, and moving in the right directions, generally.

We'll see.