The Obama-Biden Worldview (Pt. 2)

The other day in The Obama-Biden Worldview, Phyllis Bennis, Eric Margolis and Paul Heinbecker talking with Paul Jay of The Real News began a discussion and dissection of the foreign policy mindset and worldview we can expect from an Obama-Biden Administration.

Today in Part 2 of the series they go on to take a shot at the question of whether we will see some fundamental foreign policy movement away from the neocon goals of unipolar total US world military dominance and towards a more realistic and less dangerous “multipolar world” scenario, or whether an Obama-Biden administration will be a continuation of the past 60 odd years of creating the kind of resentment and blowback that causes things like 9/11.

August 31, 2008 – 11 min 43 sec

Will Obama-Biden question military dominance?

Phyllis Bennis is a Senior Analyst at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington DC. She is the author of Before and After: US Foreign Policy and the September 11 Crisis and Challenging Empire: How People, Governments, and the UN Defy US Power.  Her newest book Understanding the US-Iran Crisis: A Primer  will be available in September 2008.

Eric Margolis is a journalist born in New York City and holding degrees from Georgetown the University of Geneva, and New York University. During the Vietnam War he served as a US Army infantryman. Margolis is the author of War at the Top of the World — The Struggle for Afghanistan and Asia is a syndicated columnist and broadcaster whose articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The International Herald Tribune, Mainichi Shimbun and US Naval Institute Proceedings.

Paul Heinbecker joined the Department of External Affairs (Canada) immediately after graduation, and received postings abroad in Ankara, Stockholm, and Paris. From 1989 to 1992, Heinbecker served as Chief Foreign Policy Advisor and speechwriter for Prime Minister of Canada Brian Mulroney, and as Assistant Secretary to the Cabinet for Foreign and Defence Policy. In 1992, he was appointed ambassador to Germany. In the late 1990s, he organized the task force on the Kosovo conflict, and served as head of the Canadian delegation to the Climate Change Convention in Kyoto. In 2000, Heinbecker was appointed as Ambassador to the United Nations. There he was a strong proponent of the International Criminal Court and argued for compromise in the lead-in to the 2003 Invasion of Iraq.