The Presidential Candidates on Nation-Building

As part of the discussion on nation-building, we thought it might be useful to compare and contrast what the presidential candidates have proposed so far. Similar to what Marc Lynch noted in a post on “public diplomacy” and the “war of ideas”, both John McCain and Barack Obama have offered direct proposals for nation-building, in contrast to Hillary Clinton, whose foreign policy outline in Foreign Affairs mentioned the need for diplomacy as part of broader American policy, but nothing concrete in the way of how to shore up failing states. We’ll try to get some comment from the Clinton campaign, […]