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Soon after November’s mid-term election, the nation will be propelled whether it likes it or not into the hotly contested 2016 presidential election.  Candidates vying for the presidency have to or should begin to articulate their foreign policy vision.

Ronald Brownstein writing in the National Journal last Thursday commented how President Bush ran his foreign policy with an iron fist approach, and President Obama had a velvet glove approach.

Brownstein continued, that’s undoubtedly a simplistic verdict on the foreign policy records of the past two presidents, George W. (“iron fist”) Bush and Barack (“velvet glove”) Obama. But it now appears inevitable that the 2016 foreign policy debate will unfold against a widespread sense that America’s world position eroded under both Bush’s go-it-alone assertiveness and Obama’s deliberative multilateralism. “There will be a groping on both sides toward a new synthesis,” says Will Marshall, president of the centrist Progressive Policy Institute.

As of right now the only candidate that is running, but without officially acknowledging she is officially seeking the office of president is former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The challenge that Clinton will have to deal with is she voted for the war in Iraq and her record as Secretary of State in the Obama administration.  During her stewardship as Secretary of State she was one of the more hawkish members of the administration, often aligning herself with the Defense Department on many key issues.

This will be difficult for many of the more progressive elements in the Democratic Party to swallow.

Unfortunately, it is still too early to know who in the Republican Party will be seeking the office of president, but we are already seeing a divergent view of foreign policy being debated.

Brownstein comments, likely 2016 contender Rand Paul is building the most forceful challenge to Republican internationalism since Sen. Robert Taft in the 1950s. Paul blames today’s Mideast turmoil on mistakes by both Bush and Obama (“both sides,” the Senator insists, “continue to get foreign policy wrong”), and pledges an isolationist-tinged foreign policy that “puts America first.”

It’s ironic that since the end of World War II only three presidents came into office with any substantial foreign experience, and that doesn’t look like it will change any time soon.

Far too often we have had only candidates with foreign policy experience honed in Washington without any real practical world understanding.

One only has to understand what former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who served under both Bush and Obama, stated about utilizing all elements of U.S. power.

“I am here to make the case for strengthening our capacity to use soft power and for better integrating it with hard power.”

It seems that when it comes to the utilization of foreign policy, it’s always articulated with the use of military force as a first option without conceptualizing other elements of national power first.

The real problem with U.S. foreign policy is that both parties look at the world as they wish it to be and without understanding the world as it actually is.

We have crisis after crisis confront the U.S. and in each instance we consistently fail to understand the region we are operating in and the leaders we are dealing with.

The next president needs to understand Sun Tzu first when he wrote in his famous treatise, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

If we do not heed Sun Tzu advice then we are doomed to repeat history.