BY DAVE GUTKNECHT
• What will you do to restrict U.S. military and financial support for Israel?
Graduate level question: What would be the effect of acknowledging that Israel possesses nuclear weapons?
• Say something meaningful about the influence of the Israel lobby in the U.S.
Graduate level: Evaluate dual Israel/U.S. citizenship held by numerous high-level U.S. officials in the current and previous administrations.
• Ukraine: In 2024, what are your key lessons from the ongoing military and territorial losses, destruction and casualties in Ukraine, plus the expenditure there of hundreds of billions of dollars by the U.S.?
Graduate level: Are you willing to accept neutrality for what remains of Ukraine territory?
• Overseas priorities: How would you address conflicting domestic needs? For example, National Guard units have been deployed to overseas wars since the 1980s despite governor protests, and in 2006 all 50 governors complained that “administration policies were stripping the National Guard of equipment and personnel needed to respond to hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, forest fires and other emergencies” (New York Times, 2/27/06). After severe hurricane damage, many people were outraged in late September when 700 Tennessee Guard soldiers were nevertheless sent to the Middle East. And when electric transformers were needed in the South, there was a shortage caused in part by a great many transformers being sent to Ukraine. Given human needs and manufacturing limits, would your priorities be in the U.S. or overseas wars?
Graduate level: Why are state governors unable to deny any Pentagon order for National Guard deployment?
• NATO: What are your key lessons from expansion of NATO since 1991 — including wars in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine?
Graduate level: Why are these targets non-NATO countries that did not threaten a NATO country?
• Afghanistan: What are your key lessons from the costs of this twenty-year war and U.S. withdrawal in defeat?
Graduate level: Explain why Afghan opium/heroin trade was small under the Taliban, grew hugely under U.S. occupation, and now is again shrinking under the Taliban.
• Iraq: What are your key lessons from Iraq’s devastation following the U.S. invasion in 2003, considering the disproven U.S. story of seeking weapons of mass destruction?
Graduate level: What did former Secretary of State Madelaine Albright refer to when she famously said that the resulting one million dead Iraqis was “worth it”?
• China: Is the declared “threat” from China based on the U.S. no longer being the supreme global power?
Graduate level: Why is trying to regain U.S. unipolar supremacy a futile stance, but one that nevertheless benefits many of its advocates?
• Nuclear arms treaties: Will you reverse the history over recent decades of the U.S. discarding key international agreements? President George W. Bush unilaterally left the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in late 2001; in 2018 we left the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) Treaty that had been reached with Iran and other nations; and in 2019 President Trump left the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty.
Graduate level: What will you do to reduce nuclear threats and promote shared international agreements?
• International relations: Do you acknowledge on behalf of the U.S. that other major nations and blocs have security interests of their own that may differ from those of the U.S.?
Graduate level background: Explain how the 1962 Cuban missile crisis was resolved by a tit-for-tat in which USSR missiles were removed from Cuba in exchange for U.S. missiles being withdrawn from Turkey—yet that U.S. concession was kept out of the news for years afterwards.
• Cuba: Will you negotiate trade and cultural exchanges that help rather than impose illegal and cruel sanctions that have punished our island neighbors for sixty years?
Graduate level: Explain why the U.S. does not need a military presence (since 1898) and a torture center on the island of Cuba.
