Video: Clips From Barack Obama Foreign Policy Summit

Renewing American Leadership

Strengthening America’s Military

A Clear Choice For America

To watch more from the foreign policy summit click here.

The  Concord Monitor reports on the summit:

Obama stressed global interdependence, meaning that expanded trade and technology will bring both new opportunities and new threats. He contrasted what he called competing Democratic and Republican narratives. “One story is based on fear. It says there are all these terrible people out there out to get us, there are immigrants flooding our borders, and we have to batten down the hatches and stop change coming,” he said. “There’s another story to tell that says we have very real threats but the only way to solve them is . . . reaching out to people, encouraging greater understanding, encouraging greater immigration. . . . We have to make sure we have our act together.”

Obama said economic policy is central to national security. If a country participates in the world economy, it has a stake in maintaining that position and is more likely to resolve conflicts diplomatically, he said. Additionally, “Countries that successfully compete economically will end up also being able to protect themselves and will be militarily strong,” he said. “Countries that try to hang on to their status simply militarily are in for a fall. . . . There’s a homeland security element of making sure we’re training our scientist and engineers, revamping our school systems and making sure our entire workforce adapts to a new economy, and that’s something we haven’t heard from this administration.”

He cautioned that to gain support for an economic policy that encourages global trade, policies need to spread the benefits among average workers, not concentrate them among the top 1 percent, as he said happened under Bush.

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