“I can see Russia from my house.” So spoke comedienne Tina Fey impersonating Governor Sarah Palin in a recent Saturday Night Live skit poking fun at the Governor’s foreign policy acumen among other perceived foibles. This skit reflects the actual criticism of Governor Palin’s foreign policy credentials by the Obama campaign and various political and media pundits. Much of this disparagement is based on the extent of her political experience – Mayor of a small Alaskan city and Governor of a state with a population of approximately 670,000 (according to the US Census Bureau estimate of 2006). Do they have a point? Just how important is wider foreign policy experience to a person who would be the proverbial “heartbeat away from the presidency?” The foreign policy results of four men who went from governorships to our nation’s highest office show a mixture of success and failure.

President James Carter’s (Governor of Georgia) assistance in negotiating the 1978 Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel, which led to the Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty of 1979, is his great foreign policy success. His ineffectual negotiations with Iran during the Iran Hostage Crisis (Americans in captivity for 444 days) accompanied by the rescue attempt debacle of Desert One are his greatest failures.

President Ronald Reagan (Governor of California) decided to face the Soviet Union from a position of strength by building up American’s military forces after their stagnation in the post-Vietnam drawdown of the 1970s while engaging in diplomatic efforts to keep the Cold War from become hot. These efforts paid off in the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) of 1987 and the President’s visit to Moscow in 1988. They also played to General Secretary Mikhail Gorbechev’s policies of perestroika and glasnost – reforms within the USSR itself which led to its dissolution in 1991 and the end of the Cold War. Not all of President Reagan’s efforts succeeded so well, however. In 1983, 241 US servicemembers died when terrorists attacked the Marine barracks in Beirut during US participation in a multinational peacekeeping mission in Lebanon during its civil war. US forces withdrew soon after.

The Dayton Agreement of 1995 ending the war between the various factions in the former Yugoslavia is a foreign policy highlight of President William Clinton’s (Governor of Arkansas) administration. Less successful efforts include humanitarian interventions in Somalia (the Battle of Mogadishu related in the book Black Hawk Down) and Rwanda. President Clinton’s term also encompassed the beginning of more overt terrorist acts against the United States with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. The embassy incidents led to President Clinton ordering cruise missile attacks on terrorist targets in Afghanistan and Sudan resulting in the controversial bombing of a pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum.

The foreign policy of the present administration of President George W. Bush (Governor of Texas) is dominated by the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the war in Iraq. President Bush rightly blamed the terrorists for the attacks; Americans should not be asking themselves “Why do they hate us?” American foreign policy over the decades has not been perfect, but it does not merit the deaths of thousands of innocent people by fanatics. As for Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF), the initial military campaign succeeded superbly. The administration’s mistake was inadequate planning for the governing and rebuilding of Iraq after the campaign’s completion.

The brief descriptions of the foreign policies of Presidents Carter, Reagan, Clinton and Bush related above contain both high and low lights of their respective efforts in the international arena. They are by no means comprehensive evaluations of each President’s policies and accomplishments. They illustrate that former governors from different political parties are capable of making both effective and ineffective foreign policy decisions. In essence, they are human beings who weigh options and make decisions that result in success or failure. Governor Palin’s opponents thus should not completely discount her suitability for the Vice Presidency because she is “only” a state governor with limited foreign policy experience.