America's Role in the World

In the October 22, 2012 debate moderator Bob Schieffer asked – what is America’s role in the world? Mitt Romney got to go first and said – America has a responsibility and the privilege of helping defend freedom and promote the principles that make the world more peaceful; the principles are human rights and dignity, free enterprise, freedom of expression, and elections – because people tend to vote for peace, not war; we recognize there are places of conflict in the world – we want to end those conflicts as much as humanly possible but in order to fulfill our role in the world America must be strong, America must lead and for that to happen we have to strengthen our economy; he again described our situation. He said we have to strengthen our military long term, in 2000 there was no talk of terrorism and a year later 9/11 happened so we have to make decisions based upon uncertainty; we have to stand by our allies – he brought up tension between Israel and the US and pulling our missile program out of Poland as disrupting the relationships that existed and he thought it was an enormous mistake for the President to stand silent when the Green Movement began in Iran.

Obama said – America remains the one indispensable nation; the world needs a strong America and America is stronger now than when he came into office; because we ended the war in Iraq we are now able to refocus our efforts not only on the terrorist threat but also on beginning a transition in Afghanistan; it also allowed us to refocus on alliances and relationships that had been neglected for a decade in Asia, Europe, Africa, with Israel where we have unprecedented military and intelligence cooperation with the Iranian threat; Obama said we’ve positioned ourselves so we can start rebuilding America, that’s what my plan does – making sure we bring jobs back to America and not rewarding companies shipping jobs overseas; making sure we have the best education system in the world; he went on to repeat the things he’s done and his plans for a budget so we can get the research and technology that’s always kept us at the cutting edge; he said Romney’s plan won’t do it – as he praised Bush as a good economic steward and Cheney as showing wisdom and judgment; Romney wants to take us back to those kinds of strategies that got us into this mess and that is not the way we are going to maintain leadership in the 21^st century. I’ll give you Romney’s response next.