Debate: Who is best for Britain?

 

OBAMA: Johann Hari. McCAIN: Irwin Stelzer

 

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Johann Hari votes for Barack Obama

 

If Britain was the 51st state, we would be way out there in the blue. A YouGov poll this summer found just 14 % of us would pull their lever for John McCain – putting us beyond even San Francisco in our allergy to red-state Republicanism. Obama, by contrast, would face a landslide on the white cliffs of Dover, with 49 % of us willing him to win. We're right. If McCain wins the White House, our stormy little island will have to endure four more years of barely-trimmed Bush: a collapsing economy, an unravelling climate, and growing jihadism.

 

But let's start with the most altruistic reason why we wave the union flag for Obama. We think it is shocking that 45 million of our American cousins and friends have no healthcare insurance, and face bankruptcy and repossession if they develop a chronic illness. We are pro-American in the best sense: we want the American people to live long and healthy lives. John McCain, by contrast, opposed even the most minor measures to extend healthcare to poor children. Obama will oversee the biggest push towards universal healthcare since the 1960s, promising affordable coverage for every American citizen. We like that.

 

Yet we have selfish reasons to oppose McCain too. He has always been a proselytising, passionate proponent of the economic philosophy that directly caused the Great Wall Street Crash of 2008 – and the depression that may now follow. McCain preached that democratic regulation of business is a "burden" to be "destroyed." He got what he wanted. His closest economic advisor, Phil Gramm, wrote the legislation deregulating the mortgage and banking industries, with McCain cheering him on. They said deregulated markets would boom and benefit everyone. In fact, they scattered time-bombs of bad-debt and sub-prime mortgages across the banking system; when they did boom, they took the world economy down with them. As a result, Britain faced its first bank run in a century, and unemployment began to rise.

 

Barack Obama, by contrast, believes in regulated markets. He has always warned that if you abolish markets you get starvation – but if you abolish regulation, markets will eat themselves. He wants to begin the sensible re-regulation of the global economy, while McCain seems to have nothing to say on the subject – even trying at one point to literally run away from the presidential debates. McCain is Herbert Hoover Redux – and we all live on Wall Street now.

 

But there is an even more urgent gap between the candidates. The US is the biggest per capita belcher of heattrapping gases into the atmosphere by far – and the consequences are being felt everywhere. Eight of the hottest years ever recorded have happened in the past decade, and the Arctic is about to be entirely ice-free for the first time in three million years. The next President will be the single most important figure in negotiating the successor treaty to Kyoto in 2012 – and it may be the last chance to preserve the climate humans have evolved to
live in. If the world warms by more than two degrees (centigrade), then the earth's natural processes begin to unravel. At three degrees, the Amazon rainforest loses its humidity and collapses, while the Siberian permafrost melts and releases its vast store of methane – all causing even more warming. Soon, we will have crossed the point where we have emitted so many gases this ecological collapse becomes inevitable. London – a low-lying city with a fragile barrier – will be one of the first to suffer.

 

There is certainly no guarantee Obama will act on his good green rhetoric and keep us the right side of the Point of No Return. But he is far more likely to do so than McCain, who has shown his commitment to the issue by appointing a global warming denier as his Vice-Presidential candidate, and running on the slogan of "drill here, drill now".

 

This intersects with the other reason to prefer Obama. While the US remains addicted to oil, it is also locked into the hellish foreign policy that invaded Iraq, backed anti-democratic coups in Venezuela and Bolivia, and holds hands with the loathsome House of Saud. This amoral approach – seeing the world as a giant petrol station – breeds and spreads the jihadism that has exploded murderously on the streets of London. Obama is committed to spending tens of billions moving towards wind, solar and nuclear, getting the US slowly out of this. McCain, by contrast, has actually opposed subsidies for renewables for most of his career, and vows that "it's fine by me" if the US keeps troops in Iraq "for ten thousand years." This is a recipe for more toxic Islamism.

 

Of course it's easy to exaggerate the difference between the candidates. Obama will, like McCain, continue some of the worst acts of US state power: the unquestioning support for the Israeli and Colombian right, the senseless 'war on drugs', and the anti-democratic World Bank and International Monetary Fund, to name a few. It is a delusion to think we would wake up on 4 November in a world remade. But it will be better by crucial life-saving inches with Obama, while with John McCain, we will get the certainty of more Bush – and a poorer, more precarious Britain.

 

Johann Hari is a columnist for The Independent

Irwin Stelzer votes for John McCain

 

The old warning - be careful what you wish for - is being ignored by the mass of Britons who want to see Barack Obama in the White House. They believe that if the Senator from Illinois moves into the Oval Office, American belligerence will be replaced by soft diplomacy, the grating accents of Texas and the southwest will be replaced by the soothing accents of the American academy, 'hot' John McCain will be avoided and 'cool' Barack Obama will steer America back towards the British and European world view.

 

Perhaps. But Barack Obama will also bring with him a shift to protectionism, partly out of his conviction that the benefits of free trade have been unfairly distributed, partly out of the necessity of falling in line with the trade unions that are playing such a prominent part in his campaign. Britain's free traders cling to the hope that Obama does not mean what he says when he threatens to change the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), unilaterally if necessary; to prevent the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) from receiving  congressional approval; and to take a hard line in any future Doha-round negotiations. True, one of his academic advisors slipped into the Canadian consul's office to whisper that Obama was merely talking the talk of the campaign trail, but would walk the walk in the footsteps of free-trader Bill Clinton. But he won't: the unions won't allow it, even if the Left of his party would.

 

McCain, by contrast, is a free trader to his fingertips. And is also the candidate most likely to accept America's responsibility to contribute to the maintenance of world order. It is fashionable in Britain to pine for a US President with a European-style preference for process over action. But when a crisis occurs, say in the Balkans, Europeans, their militaries under-funded, look to the American cavalry to ride to the rescue. Obama would be unlikely to lead such a charge, and instead prefer unending negotiations at a UN that is paralysed both by its structure and by rampant corruption. Remember Serbia's ethnic cleansing, brought to a halt only by an intervention undertaken without the UN blessing that Europeans argued was necessary to legitimise US and UK intervention in Iraq.

 

The world is a dangerous place. Obama seeks to defuse that danger by holding face-to-face talks with people such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, with no preconditions. His (and Britain's) idol, Jack Kennedy, tried that with Nikita Khrushchev and left such an impression of weakness that the Russian leader believed he could with impunity place missiles 90 miles off America's shore in Cuba. The resulting confrontation came perilously close to ending in a nuclear war.

 

McCain is free of such illusions. He has long warned that it is Vladimir Putin's goal to Finlandise what he regards as Russia's 'near abroad', and so was unsurprised at Putin's invasion of Georgia. Obama, by contrast, initially offered a stumbling response. McCain looked into Putin's eyes and saw three letters, KGB. We know not what Obama will see, given the opportunity.

 

Then there is the war on terror. In the end, both candidates will preside over a troop draw-down in Iraq. The surge has worked. Attention will now turn to Afghanistan. Unless the British public really believes that the war there is unwinnable, as their military leaders and diplomats contend, they will want an American President who knows that victory can only come when we are certain that Al Qaida will not again be offered a sanctuary from which to plot strikes against the West. McCain has proven that he knows how to fashion just such a victory. Obama has demonstrated that he has no grasp of the tactics required to deny Al Qaida such a haven. So ask, who would I rather see responsible for preventing another 7/7 in the UK? It seems to me that McCain is your man.

 

There is still another reason Brits might consider a McCain presidency with less dread. There is little doubt that the Democrats will emerge from this election with control of both houses in Congress, or that the left wing of the party will set Congress' agenda. That faction has traditionally been more inward looking than McCain Republicans, a natural result of its desire to concentrate resources on expanding the welfare state. Note that in the vice presidential debates foreign aid was the only item that Joe Biden says he and Obama are willing to cut in response to the budget pressures created by the credit crunch. Note, too, that it has been a consistent theme of congressional Democrats that military expenditures come at the expense of fire trucks, bridges, schools and the like in the towns and cities of America. So, an Obama administration is unlikely to share Britain's enthusiasm for generously aiding impoverished nations. That might be money well saved, but it can't be something most British citizens deem desirable.

 

If Brits could vote in our elections, Mrs. Obama would already be choosing drapes for the White House. But you can't, and she isn't. Might be a good thing for Britain that there is still all to play for in America.

 

Irwin Stelzer is a columnist for The Sunday Times