From The Boston Globe
By Ivo Daalder and Anne-Marie Slaughter

As Barack Obama travels abroad this week, he is finding a world that still wants America to be engaged, but no longer necessarily waits for America to take the lead. The challenge for the next president is to understand how much has changed and how America can best pursue its national interests in such a different international environment.

It isn’t just the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that have changed the world, nor other aspects of the Bush legacy that have weakened America’s power and position. The world itself has changed. Ours is the era of global interconnectedness. The fate of the average American is increasingly connected to the fate of people around the world creating unparalleled opportunities but also great dangers from which no nation can be immune. Ours is also an era of increasingly diffuse power, as more powers rise to demand influence and a say over global affairs and more actors of many different kinds affect the course of global politics.

Such a world requires a new kind of leadership - one that is clear on how, when, and with whom America leads. Call it strategic leadership. A leadership that understands that while much of the world still believes that international peace and prosperity are most likely to be achieved if Washington plays a significant and constructive role, key actors no longer simply defer to or automatically prefer what America wants. A leadership that focuses on effective action rather than who is in the lead. A leadership that relies on clear judgment as much as demonstrating resolve. A leadership that grasps that however great our power, America cannot meet today’s challenges all on its own.

Strategic leadership requires a commitment to statecraft as both an alternative and a complement to military force. Although diplomacy has its limitations, US strategic interests are often best served by leveraging its potential for enhancing security, reducing tensions, resolving conflicts, achieving peace, and transforming adversarial relationships.

Read more Global Challenge

From The Washington Post
By Karen DeYoung

The U.S. Embassy in Berlin has instructed Foreign Service personnel stationed there not to attend Sen. Barack Obama’s public rally today, which the State Department this week labeled a “partisan political activity” prohibited under its regulations for those serving overseas.

Government employees serving in the United States are permitted to attend such events under the Hatch Act, which bars other partisan activity, such as contributing money or working in behalf of a candidate.

But “we always maintain that no U.S. government Foreign Service person overseas should be seen to be advocating one side or the other,” State Department Undersecretary for Management Patrick Kennedy said, adding that “it has nothing to do with who” the candidate is.

“When a German sees you there, they’re not going to think, ‘Oh, he or she is on their off time.’ It’s ‘Oh, they are a Democrat, a Republican, an independent,’ God knows what,” Kennedy said in an interview.

The American Foreign Service Association, the union of the diplomatic corps, objected to the ruling, calling it an “unnecessarily narrow interpretation” of the Foreign Affairs Manual. “The fact that you are working for the U.S. government overseas should not preclude political activity that you could engage in in the United States,” one retired senior Foreign Service officer said.

Read more Off-Limits

From Der Spiegel

Would he drive to the Chancellery in a motorcade or would he take a helicopter for his visit to Chancellor Angela Merkel? Obama’s charter jet had barely touched down at Berlin’s Tegel Airport, and reporters were already asking the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate how he planned to get around the city.

Then he stepped into a sedan — part of a long motorcade, accompanied by US security vehicles and German police — and began the journey to downtown Berlin, with hundreds of fans standing by as he made his way. Obama briefly greeted a crowd assembled on the street before disappearing into the Chancellery. As she greeted the presidential candidate, Merkel said she was hoping to have a good conversation with Obama.

The talks between the German leader and Obama lasted for about an hour, and the pair reportedly discussed climate protection, global trade and German-American relations. Just after 12 p.m., the Illinois senator and his entourage traveled about a half a mile further to the Adlon Hotel near the Brandenburg Gate before a afternoon meeting planned with German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier of the Social Democrats.

Obama finally arrived at the Foreign Ministry a little after 2 p.m. and emerged almost an hour later. Immediately following the meeting, Steinmeier announced: “The atmosphere was open and trusting. We built on our telephone conversation from mid-April.” Steinmeier said he detected parallels in their philosophy of foreign policy. “Cooperation instead of confrontation — that is also his foreign policy aim,” adding that it had been a good conversation.

Read more European Role

From Think Progress

Cenk Uygur notes that “the media missed” a false statement from Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) recent CBS interview where he incorrectly claimed the surge “began the Anbar Awakening.” When asked by Kate Couric about whether the money spent on the surge would have been better spent in Afghanistan, McCain claimed Iraq (not Afghanistan) was the “first major conflict since 9/11“:

McCAIN: The fact is we had four years of failed policy. We were losing. We were losing the war in Iraq. The consequences of failure and defeat of the United States of America in the first major conflict since 9/11 would have had devastating impacts throughout the region and the world.

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From TruthDig
By Ellen Goodman

Is it any wonder that John McCain was feeling a tad neglected? There was Barack Obama on a nine-day trip through eight countries with three network anchors and all John got was a lousy T-shirt. Or to be more exact, all he got was a ride in George H.W. Bush’s golf cart and a rejection slip from The New York Times’ Op-Ed editor.

Even McCain’s inner circle began to get snarky. They keep referring to Obama as “The One” and complain that the maverick boytoy McCain has been replaced in the media’s heart by a new trophy wife named Barack. The straight talker’s Web site even posted a video of “The Media is in Love,” a montage of fawning sound bites against a soundtrack of Frankie Valli singing “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You.”

Never mind that Frankie’s “Eyes” was a No. 2 hit in 1967, a year when Obama was 6. For some reason, McCain’s cultural references have a sell-by date of 1970. It’s like the strange “Summer of Love” ad that tries to place Obama in the upheavals of 1968 when he was headed to second grade.

But it wasn’t just Frankie Valli that makes me feel that the Republican is locked into a 40-year-old time frame. It’s the debate about Iraq itself.

Gary Hart once said, “In a way, John is refighting the Vietnam War.” For a long time, the former prisoner of war has believed that Vietnam should have, could have had a different ending. Americans lost the war because they lost their will. He’s thought more about the sorry last chapter of that war than its foolish beginning.

So, too, his attention on Iraq has been less on the war’s origin than on some undefined victorious conclusion. McCain jumped the shark when he accused Obama of wanting to win an election even if it meant losing a war. But even before that intemperate charge, he said something equally damning: “The fact is, if we had done what Sen. Obama wanted to do, we would have lost.”

Read more McCain

From Der Spiegel
By Marc Pitzke

John McCain has attempted to distract from Barack Obama’s tour of the Middle East and Europe by attacking his foreign policy record. But he’s failing to take the shine off the Democratic candidate in the US election. The Republican has a problem.

It was the ultimate humiliation for an author. The submitted essay didn’t provide enough information, the newspaper wrote in its rejection. The article could not be accepted as written, the opinion page editor wrote.

The rejection came on Friday in an e-mail and has only now come to light. The newspaper was the New York Times, and the luckless author was Republican presidential candidate John McCain.

These are hard times for him. Rival Barack Obama is scoring campaign points against McCain on his current international tour — which has turned into the media event of the summer in the US thanks to good PR choreography, a backdrop of strong public support wherever he goes and a favorable news environment.

Obama’s brief visits to Afghanistan and Iraq, the backing of Iraqi premier Nuri al-Maliki (more…) for Obama’s 16-month US troop withdrawal plan and the prospect of a rapturous welcome in Germany (more…) — these are getting top media coverage in America and bestowing superstar status on the Democratic candidate.

Read more Frustration

From The NY Times
By Timothy Egan

There he is, the sound of money in a wizened Texas drawl, the tired realist looking a bit like the John Huston character from “Chinatown” as he warns in national television ads that we should just listen here and do as he says.

And what the 80-year-old T. Boone Pickens says, in a $58 million campaign, is that we can’t drill our way to lower gas prices. By implication, anybody who tells you otherwise — including the fellow Texan he helped put in the White House — is a fraud.

This is a political parable for the ages: the guy who was behind one of the knockout punches to John Kerry four years ago is now doing Democrats the biggest favor of the election by calling Republicans on their phony energy campaign.

“Totally misleading” is the way Pickens describes Republican attempts to convince the public that if we just opened up all these forbidden areas to oil drilling then gas prices would fall. He’s not against new drilling, but he is honest enough to say it wouldn’t do anything.

Republicans are furious at their longtime benefactor. Senator John McCain is currently running an ad in which he directly blames Barack Obama for $4-a-gallon gas at the pump — as bogus a claim as anything yet made in 2008.

Then along comes Pickens, Texas oilman and billionaire corporate raider, overwhelming the McCain attack with a saturation message that has the added value of being true, as Henry Kissinger once said about another matter.

Read more Oil Man

From The Consortium News
By Brent Budowsky

John McCain, presumably advised by Karl Rove and definitely imitating the politics of George Bush, is now saying that Barack Obama would rather lose a war than lose an election.

This is a defamation; this is a slander; this is a lie. McCain should apologize to Obama.

This is the latest in a long list of cheap-shot, low-blow politics. McCain has learned nothing about why the American people are rejecting the Republicans and why the Republican brand has been compared to the appeal of defective dog food.

On Wednesday morning, right-wing former congressman Joe Scarborough essentially said that Keith Olbermann is “too stupid to be on television.”

Here is the story, which is much more important than the rantings of former right-wing politicians who become cable television politicians.

The soon-to-be-fired, low-ratings CBS anchor Katie Couric did interviews Tuesday night with both McCain and Obama.

In the McCain interview, the candidate who makes a growing list of factual errors wrongly said the Sunni Awakening was a result of the surge. He referred to a conversation between Sunnis and then-Col. (now Gen.) McFarlane that he falsely claimed resulted from the surge.

Problem is, the conversation McCain quoted happened long before the surge.

Read more Media

From In These Times
By Kate Sheppard

Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) campaign and the media would have us believe that herds of disaffected women voters will be stampeding to the Republicans this year because a woman candidate won’t be on the presidential ballot in November.

McCain’s campaign has been making a clear play for women voters in recent weeks, hosting conference calls with Republican women and touting that his policies on national security, the economy and healthcare appeal to women voters.

But the suggestion that women — and feminist women, at that — will be lining up behind him is a fairytale. At least, it should be. McCain’s record and policies on issues of importance to women are neither moderate nor maverick.

In The Nation, Katha Pollitt put it simply: “[T]o vote for McCain, a feminist would have to be insane.”

But the chatter about the voting decisions of former presidential candidate Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) supporters continues. Much of the recent talk has focused on PUMAs (the acronym stands for “Party Unity My Ass”), a group supposedly so angry about the Democratic primary that they won’t vote for Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.). But as blogger Amanda Marcotte reported, PUMA PAC was started by a McCain donor, according to the Federal Election Commission.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t angry Clinton voters. But the number of progressive or even moderate voters who would seriously consider voting for McCain is much smaller than the media would have you believe. Unfortunately, McCain’s propaganda seems to be working, at least on those who aren’t aware of his record on issues of concern to women voters.

Read more McSexist

From The NY Observer
By Joe Conason

Barack Obama knows which countries border Iraq; he understands the difference between Shia and Sunni; and he is probably aware that Czechoslovakia no longer exists—but as John McCain complains, the young senator has “no military experience whatsoever.” Indeed, like both of the last two presidents, Mr. Obama possesses scant credentials in national security and foreign policy.

Why, then, does he appear increasingly plausible as the next president? Assurance, grace, and mastery of the facts have helped to lift his stature, as did his daring decision to venture abroad, directly challenging his older opponent’s perceived strength. But granting his talent and initiative, the strongest argument for the Democrat is the weak performance of the Republican regime’s vaunted “grown-ups,” including Mr. McCain and his advisers. They have gone far in proving that experience can be overrated.

Following the 9/11 attacks, conventional commentary constantly informed Americans that we were lucky to be led at that perilous time by the old Republican hands in the Bush White House. Not George W. Bush himself, of course, whose résumé featured an abbreviated stint in the Texas Air National Guard and perhaps a few visits to Tijuana. We were supposed to thank providence for the wisdom and skill of Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, along with a phalanx of deputies, assistants and subalterns. They had won the first Gulf War and their presence in Washington dated back to the Nixon era. They would know what to do.

Nearly every decision those highly qualified individuals made, from the day they took over in 2001, has been wrong, starting with the dismissal of the Al Qaeda threat and moving on to the invasion of Iraq; the diplomatic standoffs with Iran, North Korea and Syria; the sidelining of the Mideast peace process; and the unilateral impulse that has damaged American alliances around the world.

Read more Foreign Policy