Fundamental Differences

Obama's vision for integrating nations into a global liberal trade order is in line with Eisenhower's and Marshall's. To wit, democracy cannot be imposed by the barrel of a gun. It must come from the ground up. It must be based on institutions (currency, infrastructure, academic, judicial, parliamentary, etc) and not one election. In order to achieve a lasting peace, he believes we must foster interdependencies based on trade and shared problems (such as climate change), that require us to work with autocratic regimes like the Chinese. He's very much in line with the Friedmans, Barnetts, and Zakarias of the world when it comes to trade and the global order.

McCain still believes that democracy can be imposed, and he believes, like Wolfowitz and the other true believers in the neo-con circle, that the will of peoples can be ignored as long as you have the backing of the government (hence their trusting the alliances that they fostered with countries as different as pre-2004 Spain and Pakistan under Mushe). He, like George W, "doesn't do nuance." He advocates kicking the Russians out of the G8, something they would have to agree to under the terms of the group, and creating an arcane League of Democracies that would surely be ineffective due to a lack of support from the countries that would be included (Europe, Japan, S Korea, Oceania) and the nature of the problems in the world today (disease, global poverty, global climate change, global guerrillas, global energy crisis) that transcend political ideology and traverse entire oceans and continents. McCain is hopeless when it comes to Iran, his line of thinking only anticipating a crisis that has yet to take full form. Karen Armstrong's brief description of the failures of modernity in the Muslim world in her book Islam is a good example of what we can continue to expect from such idiotic foreign policies.