A Question for Obama and McCain

Jeffrey Garten has an interesting post up over at Yale Global about how the U.S. presidential candidates should take their “Town Hall” format of question-and-answer sessions to international audiences, where they can get some new urgent questions that they haven’t yet been made to answer by the inward-focused U.S. voters.

A possibility from Europe: “America is obsessed with challenges from the Middle East and China, but without its European partners, the US alone has little leverage in either arena, let alone on other pressing questions like climate change, currency stability or Russia’s worst authoritarian instincts. How do you envision the US-European relationship at a time when so many of the links that used to exist during the Cold War seem to have disappeared? Because neither of the two candidates has covered these kinds of issues in any depth, Americans would likely be fascinated with the questions and riveted by the answers. For two men who aspire to occupy the world’s most important leadership position, surely it’s time for this discussion.