To start, we don't know yet much about whether she has any foreign affairs experience as a politician. Alaska is a noncontiguous state with Russia and Canada on its borders. Alaska fronts the Arctic, which has become, as Arctic ice recedes (temporarily) the new frontier for black gold and other resources. While it is the business of the national government to deal with international relations, it is likely that Sarah Palin has had to address such issues in some way. Not solving the Berlin blockade, to be sure, but foreign affairs could not be out of her consciousness.
As Governor, Palin has been working with two large oil companies to build a $40billion natural gas pipeline from Alaska's north slope across Alaska to Canada and thence across Canada to Chicago. These discussions and plans certainly involve negotiations with Canada and considerations of laws and regulations regarding such commerce. This is not an uncomplicated project or issue. She mentioned the pipeline in her first speech, after McCain's announcement of her selection as VP candidate. She's a quick study. She'll do well--you just watch her. (Update, August 30, 2008.)
There are two issues, not one, involving foreign affairs. Having knowledge of foreign nations and affairs is always, no matter how knowledgeable the president, an issue of having advisors and consulting experts in the president's appointive inner circle, as well as having the executive departments of state and defense and justice, and others, to draw upon. Judgment will be obtained in the consulting process of foreign policy and crisis deliberation. Palin would drawn upon this cafeteria of advice just as would Obama and McCain, if she is suddenly thrust into the Oval Office.
The position of vice president is not that of secretary of state; it is not a primer for being secretary of state. The guys over at Volokh Conspiracy are concerned that Palin could not step into the Oval Office, if McCain were to keel over, God forbid, and deliberate about thirty foreign policy and international crises as if she were a senior professor and analyst from Yale. Well, I have news for them; there is no one who could do that. What the president needs, in such situations, is an understanding of her/his instincts for people, who can be trusted as a advisor, who is to be doubted, and a fundamental vision of how the world works. She was a professional journalist. I bet that she got a good instinct for who is grinding an agenda, who is forthright, who is on your side, and so on. As for a world vision, I don't know that she has one, but I'm guessing that as Governor she has accumulated large bits and pieces of such a philosophy. She'll get more as an understudy to McCain. She obviously has political instincts about people; those instincts will guide her through the treacheries of the professional staffs at State, CIA, FBI, Defense, and other federal agencies.
The other issue is decision making. Here we have reason to believe Palin has strength. The President has to make "the buck stops here" decisions. All by him/her self. McCain has clearly deep wells of experience in making existential decisions of this sort. Neither Obama nor Biden have, at least in their public biography, ever made an existential decision of great import. Obama has, nearly his entire career, avoided such decisions. I do not consider opposing the Iraq War while having no responsibility for it, as he was sitting in the Illinois legislature at the time, an existential decision. It was a freebie that reveals nothing about Obama's ability to make decisions. Obama's mind is, further, so confused by ideology and verbal nuance that he is incapable of having a clear vision of any decision he might have to make in a complicated crisis. Biden has never made an executive decision in foreign affairs; period. He is a prevaricating, waffling blow-hard politician, who has had a few good moments in committee and on the stump, but otherwise provides no evidence that he has the balls to make the calls.
As Governor, Palin has had to make executive decisions. She has done so, in a variety of venues on a variety of issues, with bold fortitude and willingness to take the political flack. Read her Wikipedia entry. I'd say that puts her in the win column on this issue of foreign affairs readiness to occupy the Oval Office, should she (and we hope she would not) have to do so if McCain were incapacitated. Truman could do it, in not too dissimilar circumstances; I'm prepared to believe she could, too.
Revised.
Update. August 30, 2008. Palin is not intimidated by attacks that she is "inexperienced". See her response, while shopping!, to reporters.
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