It was there, Obama wrote in his second autobiography, that he first absorbed the "jumble of warring impulses" that make up U.S. foreign policy, and received a street-level understanding of how foreigners react to "our tireless promotion of American-style capitalism" and to Washingtons "tolerance and occasional encouragement of tyranny, corruption and environmental degradation."
As the campaigns tell the story, those radically different experiences in different corners of Southeast Asia have created two men with sharply different views about the proper use of American power.
McCains campaign portrays him as an experienced warrior who knows how to win wars and carries Teddy Roosevelts big stick, even if he occasionally strays from TRs advice about speaking softly. Obamas campaign portrays him as a cerebral advocate of patient diplomacy, the antidote to the unilateral excesses of the Bush years, who knows how to build partnerships without surrendering American interests.
But as the campaign has unfolded, both men have been forced into surprising detours. They may have formed their worldviews in Vietnam and Indonesia, but they forged specific positions amid the realities of an election in post-Iraq, post-crash America where judgment sometimes collides with political expediency.
The result has included contradictions that do not fit the neat hawk-and-dove images promoted by each campaign. As spelled out in presidential debates, in written answers provided by their campaigns, and in an interview with McCain in January, some of their views appear as messy and unpredictable as the troubles one of them will inherit.
For example, it is McCain the man who amended the words of a Beach Boys song last year to joke about bombing Irans nuclear sites who says he could imagine a situation in which Irans behavior changes so much that he would be willing "to consider" allowing Iran to enrich its own uranium, producing a fuel that could be used for nuclear power but only under highly restrictive conditions that ensure it could never be used for weapons.
Obama, the candidate who has expressed far more willingness to sit down and negotiate with the Iranians, said in an e-mail message passed on by an aide that in any final deal he would not allow Iran to produce uranium on Iranian soil, the same hard-line view enunciated by the Bush administration.
On the delicate issue of Pakistan, Obama has expressed far more willingness than McCain to threaten sending U.S. troops over the border in ground raids against terrorists. McCain, by contrast, argues that Pakistan must control its territory.
"I dont think the American people today are ready to commit troops to Waziristan," he said, several months before President Bush signed secret orders this summer authorizing ground raids into Pakistan, including the violent sanctuaries of North and South Waziristan.
McCain, now the Republican nominee, agreed to an interview during the primary campaign. Obama aides answered questions at length, but Obama, the Democratic nominee, citing the pressures of time in the campaign, declined requests dating to June to be interviewed in detail on how he would handle potential confrontations beyond Iraq that could face the next president.
Presidential campaigns are usually terrible predictors of presidential decision-making. In 1960, John F. Kennedy said nothing about building up troops in Vietnam. In 1968, Richard M. Nixon said nothing about engineering an opening to China. George W. Bush, in an interview shortly before taking office in 2001, lamented that sanctions against Saddam Hussein looked like "Swiss cheese" but did not appear, at that time, to be heading toward a military confrontation with him.
NEW LOOK AT ENGAGEMENT
With the endgame slowly playing out in Iraq, the potential confrontation over neighboring Iran and its nuclear program has emerged as the No.1 case study in how Obama and McCain would use diplomacy and the threat of military force against a hostile state. Based on their careers and their statements, McCains threshold for pre-emptive military action seems lower than Obamas.
For each candidate, the debate over Iran has been somewhat treacherous. Obama knew his interest in pursuing diplomacy could leave him vulnerable to criticism as a potential appeaser; McCain, known for his "Bomb Iran" ditty, had to demonstrate that he would not be trigger-happy.
Both candidates have proved more comfortable in declaring that they would never allow Iran to become a nuclear weapons state than in explaining how they would obtain the leverage to stop Irans nuclear program peacefully. And neither has dealt publicly with the harder question of what to do if Iran assembles all the fuel and components needed for a weapon but stops just short of actually making one.
Obamas declaration that he would engage Iranian leaders without preconditions has ended up dominating most of the debate and opening him to McCains accusation that he is a naif, willing to give legitimacy to the Iranian regime. Obama has backtracked a bit, arguing that he never suggested that the first meetings would be at the presidential level, and that preconditions are less important than "careful preparations."
When pressed, Obama has also insisted that "we will never take military options off the table" and that he would not give the United Nations "veto power" over the decision to strike nuclear facilities.
The harder question is how to force Iran to give up its uranium enrichment quickly, before it produces enough material to build a weapon a threshold that U.S. and European intelligence officials believe Tehran may cross fairly early in the next presidential term.
McCain has been the more vociferous in emphasizing that "we have to do whatevers necessary" to stop Iran from obtaining a weapon. In 1994, when North Korea was at a similar stage in its nuclear weapons program, McCain said on "Meet the Press" on NBC that if diplomacy failed to shut down the countrys production facilities within months, "then yes, military air strikes would be called for."
But in a post-Iraq world, McCain has been more circumspect. He no longer talks about "rogue state rollback," the phrase he used in 2000 to describe a strategy of undermining regimes like North Korea, Iran and Iraq under Saddam.
On Iran, McCain said in interviews last year and early this year that it might be better to risk military action against Iran than "living with an Iranian bomb." In recent months he has expressed more interest in changing Irans behavior than changing the regime, and has said that his Beach Boys ditty was a bad attempt at humor: "I wasnt suggesting that we go around and declare war."
But the main prescription McCain has offered relies on gradually escalating economic sanctions, the same path taken by the Bush administration. So far that strategy has been a failure: Iran has 3.800 centrifuges, up from a few hundred experimental centrifuges when the administration began, and enough, in theory, to make a bombs worth of fuel in a year.
Questions posed to both campaigns in the past few weeks have yielded another example of role reversal. While McCain seems willing to consider the possibility that Iran might someday be trusted to produce its own nuclear fuel, Obama does not.
The director of foreign policy for the McCain campaign, Randy Scheunemann, said that if Iran got back in compliance with all U.N. resolutions, "it would be appropriate to consider" letting it produce uranium under inspection, which Iran has said is its right.
Obamas position is closer to the zero-tolerance approach adopted by the Bush administration. "I do not believe Iran should be enriching uranium or keeping centrifuges," Obama said in an e-mail message passed on by aides.
Obama does seem more willing to dangle in front of the Iranians a "grand bargain" that would spell out benefits diplomatic recognition, an end to sanctions as a reward for halting its enrichment of uranium and allowing full inspections of the country. Richard J. Danzig, considered a candidate to be secretary of defense in an Obama administration, said Obama was willing to "put out a more positive side to the agenda to lead the Iranians toward making the right choices here."
But Obama has also been more specific in describing the kind of sanctions he might reach for if the Iranians continue on the current path. "If we can prevent them from importing the gasoline that they need, and the refined petroleum products, that starts changing their cost-benefit analysis," Obama said.
Some experts have counseled caution about such an approach, one that the Bush administration has stopped short of taking. A blockade, however, could constitute an act of war, and most experts believe Iran could respond in kind by cutting off oil exports, increasing prices and leading to shortages.
WHEN TO INTERVENE
While McCain reminds audiences that he vowed to do whatever it took to win in Iraq, he has been extraordinarily reluctant when it comes to the war in Afghanistan to advocate cross-border attacks into Pakistan, even though top military commanders have publicly said that is a prerequisite to victory. McCain has dismissed Obamas advocacy of military action inside Pakistan as unwise, saying his rival does not appreciate how Pakistanis would react to the discovery that their ally was invading parts of their territory, even ungovernable territory Pakistan itself has never really controlled.
That was Bushs view as well until July, when he issued secret orders allowing U.S. Special Operations forces to conduct ground incursions across the Pakistani border, to keep insurgents from forming a safe haven.
McCain has not condemned Bushs action, but he has suggested that such operations should never be discussed in public and that Obama was making a rookies mistake by raising the possibility.
"The last thing we should be doing is telegraphing to Pakistan that we are going to violate their sovereignty," Scheunemann said last week, when asked if McCain was opposed to military action over the border, or just opposed to talking about it. "Sen. Obamas stubborn insistence on publicly threatening to attack targets in Pakistan and limit military assistance is swagger, not statesmanship."
Obamas own discussion of the issue has been less than clear. He has frequently said that he would send U.S. personnel over the border to kill leaders of al-Qaida, starting with Osama bin Laden. In his speech at the Democratic convention, Obama accused McCain of focusing on the wrong war Iraq and he vowed to hunt down bin Laden and his lieutenants.
But U.S. policy since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has backed the idea of hunting down Qaida members anywhere, including inside Pakistan. A harder question is whether the United States will go into Pakistan to hunt down Taliban or other militant groups that are using the sanctuary either to mount attacks against U.S. forces in Afghanistan or to launch strikes against the Pakistani government. On that question, Obamas statements have been ambiguous, and his campaign has declined to clarify them.
HUMANITARIAN AID
When it comes to sending troops to protect the oppressed, Obama has sounded a more like an interventionist than McCain.
McCain has long been a skeptic of sending U.S. troops on humanitarian quests whether for peacekeeping, peacemaking or missions that morphed from one to the other. He reminded voters during the campaign that he opposed the U.S. military interventions in Lebanon in the early 1980s, and in Somalia, Haiti and Bosnia in the 1990s. He has often asked what good U.S. troops can do in a single year when the conflict they are parachuting into has roiled for centuries, and he has often demanded to see an exit strategy before troops were committed.
Obama has praised what the United Nations now calls a "responsibility to protect," a doctrine that elevates the importance of aiding oppressed populations over respecting national borders. McCain has agreed, but both men have emphasized the need for case-by-case judgment.
In an article in Foreign Affairs, Obama laid out a position that is the opposite of Bushs attitude in 2000 but sounds much like his attitude now. Obama wrote that he would use U.S. military forces to "support friends, participate in stability and reconstruction operations or confront mass atrocities." But he cited the first President George Bush as the example to follow in gaining "the clear support and participation of others."
In a debate in early October, Obama said that in Darfur the United States "could be providing logistical support, setting up a no-fly zone, at relatively little cost to us" if it had help from other nations. But when pressed, Obamas aides said that he would be hesitant to commit American ground troops, who are in short supply in any event because of the demands of Iraq and Afghanistan.
DEALING WITH GREAT POWERSWithin hours of the Russian attack on Georgia in August, McCain was on the phone to his foreign policy advisers, seeking to calibrate the right response. It was a critical moment for a man who has always surrounded himself with members of both warring camps in the Republican Party the neoconservatives nursing their wounds after Iraq went bad, and the pragmatists who rose again in Bushs second term.
"He had people telling him, John, you want to think about the long term we need the Russians on Iran, and the Georgians sort of invited this," a friend who talked to him in this period said. But in the end, McCain stepped out with a strong statement in defense of Georgia, while Obama issued a much more even-handed statement, calling for all sides to return to the uneasy status quo that had prevailed in South Ossetia.
While Obamas reaction was much closer to the Bush administrations, McCain seized on the moment to portray Obama as weak. McCains friends say his criticism of Russia over the episode is a direct outgrowth of his prisoner-of-war experience and his Cold War upbringing. He regularly reminds voters that when he looks into the eyes of the Russian leader Vladimir V. Putin, he sees three letters: KGB.
The difference has also played out in how McCain and Obama have embraced a proposal by four prominent Cold Warriors former Sen. Sam Nunn, former Defense Secretary William J. Perry, and former Secretaries of State George P. Shultz and Henry A. Kissinger toward reducing the U.S. nuclear arsenal to zero.
Both candidates have said they support the goal, but McCain has sounded less enthusiastic, saying he would reduce nuclear weapons "to the lowest level we judge necessary."
Many conservatives also object to the idea of deep cuts in the arsenal, saying that could harm the ability of the United States to remain the worlds dominant superpower and encourage nuclear challengers to build up to U.S. levels.
By contrast, Obama, who was only 28 when the Berlin Wall fell, has argued that unless the United States and Russia radically reduce their stockpiles, they will never persuade smaller nations like Iran and North Korea to forgo their nuclear weapons programs.
Both men say they share the goal of keeping the United States the most powerful nation on earth. McCain emphasizes hard power first, though his advisers say that on global warming, among other issues, he has shown a flexibility that Bush rarely demonstrated. More than any previous presidential nominee, Obama has emphasized the idea of soft power Americas ability to lead by moral example and nonmilitary actions and his challenge if elected, his advisers acknowledge, is to convince the world that an untested young senator also has a steely edge.