The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Dependence on expensive foreign oil. Challenging diplomacy with nuclear-armed countries.
America's next president needs a strong vision and stronger will to tackle these formidable tasks and those that lie ahead.
Which candidate is best equipped to meet these challenges?
A panel of top advisers to the Republican and Democratic presidential nominees addresses each candidate's plan to improve our international security- The Commonwealth Club of California
Bio
Michael McFaul
Michael A. McFaul is Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and associate professor of political science at Stanford University.
Before joining the Stanford faculty in 1995, he worked for two years as a senior associate in residence at the Carnegie Moscow Center. McFaul is also research associate at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and the Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, both at Stanford, and senior advisor to the National Democratic Institute.
He serves on the board of directors of the Eurasia Foundation, Firebird Fund, International Forum for Democratic Studies of the National Endowment for Democracy, Institute of Social and Political Studies, Center for Civil Society International, and Institute for Corporate Governance and Law; the steering committee for the Europe and Eurasia division of Human Rights Watch, and the editorial boards of Current History, Journal of Democracy, Demokratizatsiya, and Perspectives on European Politics and Society.
He has served as a consultant for numerous companies and government agencies.
Robert James Woolsey
R. James Woolsey is chairman of Woolsey Partners LLC and former United States Director of Central Intelligence, heading the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. Intelligence Community.
Specializing in a range of alternative energy and security issues, Woolsey serves in various capacities at VantagePoint Venture Partners, Paladin Capital Group and the law firm Goodwin Procter. Previously, he was a vice president and officer of Booz Allen Hamilton, and a partner at the law firm Shea & Gardner (now Goodwin Procter) in Washington, D.C., where he practiced for 22 years in the fields of civil litigation, arbitration and mediation.
Including his Central Intelligence tenure, Woolsey served in the U.S. government on five different occasions, holding presidential appointments in two Republican and two Democratic administrations. He was ambassador to the Negotiation on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, under secretary of the Navy, general counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services and part-time delegate at large to the U.S.–Soviet Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) and Nuclear and Space Arms Talks (NST). As an officer in the U.S. Army, he was an adviser on the U.S. delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I).
Woolsey serves on a range of government, corporate, and nonprofit advisory boards, chairing several, and has served in the past as a member of boards of directors of a number of publicly and privately held companies, generally in fields related to technology and security. He is a frequent contributor of articles to major publications, and gives public speeches and media interviews on the subjects of foreign affairs, defense, energy, and intelligence. Having received his bachelor's degree from Stanford University, Woolsey earned a master's degree at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, and a law degree from Yale Law School.
What chutzpah - if the politically chimerical and cynically disingenuous Mega-Hawk Woolsey really wishes to know why America has a problem with so-called “terrorism,” he need only gaze into his own mirror < http://tinyurl.com/5qaeyl >. In the national media and on the speakers circuit, nominal, “former,” CIA director Woolsey has been a strident and shameless cheerleader, warmongering incessantly for an interventionist Washington foreign policy < http://tinyurl.com/6fwx2m >, especially in the Middle East where he and his Neocon cabal consider such policies of particular benefit to Zionist interests.
member. 
