Five Foreign Policy Matters Obama Must Handle Well

Obama must succeed on key foreign policy issues.

Don’t listen to Newt Gingrich. If you believe anything he’s said recently, you’d think President Barack Obama was hell bent on leaving country vulnerable to another terrorist attack on American soil.

The former speaker isn’t the only one with a “chicken little” streak. Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney has repeatedly claimed a second-term Obama presidency guarantees Iran will have a nuclear weapon. (Has he been consulting with Ms. Cleo?)

All kidding aside, Obama’s next term can be defined by how much of his foreign policy platform holds up to scrutiny and testing by frequently unpredictable world powers.

On at least three of the five issues listed below, the Obama administration has to maneuver carefully. That statement need only be qualified with the widely understood interconnected nature of the global economy. Instability in some cases can affect everything from (our rising) gas prices to the nation’s GDP.

In simpler words, failures on foreign policy can hit Americans in the wallet, in a way that they can feel. (That’s in addition to the trillion dollars spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.)

[ALSO READ: "Obama Address High Gas Prices"]

Here are the five foreign policy issues Pres. Obama and his administration must succeed on and, in his own words, the approach for each of them:

1. Keeping Israel-Iran nuclear threat at bay

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2. Ending the war in Afghanistan

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3. Improving the situation at U.S.-Mexico board

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4. Quelling Americans’ fear of China

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5. Preventing any terror attacks on American soil