From a political perspective, I think Obama was a pretty clear winner of this debate. He parried all of McCain’s attacks, got in a few digs of his own, and came across as both approachable and in command of the facts. McCain seemed a little bit senile. On policy, though, Obama was extremely disappointing.

I’m not a fan of Obama’s health care plan, but that’s no surprise. I don’t generally like Democrats’ health care plans. And his answers on Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan were sharp and I largely agreed with them. However, what made me wince was any time the subject turned to foreign policy anywhere other than the Middle East.

First we had the Rwandan genocide question. In essence, Brokaw asked whether Obama believed in preventative war for humanitarian purposes. And Obama basically said yes. With the usual liberal throat-clearing about working with allies, he appears to believe that if large numbers of people are getting slaughtered anywhere in the world, the US military has a moral obligation to intervene.

I don’t agree with that, but it’s a pretty standard liberal line so I’m not too outraged about it. The answer that most disturbed me, though, was the Russia question. John McCain had said that the United States should be willing to declare war on Russia to protect the soveriegnty of Georgia and Ukraine (that’s what NATO membership means). Brokaw asked Obama if he agreed, and with more throat-clearing, Obama basically said that he did.

This is insanity. Georgia is a tiny country directly adjacent to the Russian border. If Russia decides it wants to conquer Georgia, it can do so in a matter of days, and there’s not much we can do about it. The only way we can hope to prevent it is by making it clear to the Russians that we’ll launch a full-scale war on them if they impinge on Georgian sovereignty, and of course that could lead to a full-scale war with Russia. And while I certainly sympathize with the Georgia’s 4.5 million people, it’s reckless to risk a continent-wide war that could kill hundreds of thousands of people in order to protect it.

More disturbing than this particular example is the picture it appears to paint of Obama’s foreign policy views. As far as I can tell, Iraq is the only war that Obama is against. Maybe when he says he opposes dumb wars, what he really means is that he opposes wars prosecuted by dumb presidents, and since he’s a smart guy that doesn’t apply to him.

In any event, I think anyone expecting the Obama administration to be less hawkish than the Bush administration has been will be sorely disappointed. Bill Clinton was reasonably hawkish, and the atmosphere of public hysteria about foreign threats has ratcheted up considerably since then. I expect Obama’s foreign policy to be more sensible than George W. Bush’s was because Obama’s a more sensible guy. But in terms of broad strategic doctrine, there’s every reason to think Obama will continue the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush legacy of promiscuous military intervention abroad. We’ll have different wars, and maybe slightly smarter wars, but I don’t expect we’ll have fewer wars.