Because Barack Obama has had such a short career in national politics, his private life comes under even greater scrutiny than that of most American presidential candidates. The media circuses surrounding his ties to former pastor Reverend Jeremiah Wright and Chicago slumlord Tony Rezko are two of many high-profile examples. But one aspect of Obama’s private life that has not garnered nearly enough attention is his uniquely international and multicultural upbringing.

This background has certainly given Obama a unique outlook on the American dream. Last month, in his now famous speech on racism, Obama remarked: “I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slave-owners. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles, and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents. And for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on earth is my story even possible.” Obama’s life story is one that bridges gaps—his Kenyan ancestry connects him with the people of the world’s poorest continent, his upbringing in Indonesia connects him with the Muslim world, and his mixed heritage itself bridges America’s racial divide.

But the Clinton and McCain campaigns are quick to point out that this background does not make up for what they consider a lack of political experience. According to the other candidates, Obama’s political career—eight years in the Illinois State Senate and two and a half years as a U.S. Senator—is too short to make him a trustworthy commander in chief.

However, Clinton and McCain are not the foreign policy experts they claim to be. Much of Hillary Clinton’s supposed experience was during her eight years as First Lady—a role that requires little more than smiling at photo-ops and drinking tea with dignitaries’ wives. Clinton claims to have played a key role in the I.R.I.S. peace process and in alleviating the Kosovo refugee crisis. But diplomatic sources close to these incidents reveal that she exaggerated her involvement in both. For his part, last month McCain repeatedly accused Iran’s Shiite government of training al-Qaida, a Sunni fundamentalist group and bitter enemy of Iran. And, of course, both Clinton and McCain supported President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, having been duped into believing that Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to the U.S.

One can only wonder what Bush’s foreign policy would have been like had he possessed Obama’s international background. As a presidential candidate, Bush was famous for his inability to remember the name of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, and he traveled little prior to his presidency. His lack of understanding of foreign affairs made it obvious that he would have failed to foresee the Sunni-Shiite civil war that broke out as a result of his invasion of Iraq—like McCain, he probably didn’t even know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite. In the context of such ignorance, his unilateralist “you’re-either-with-us-or-against-us” attitude makes sense.

An Obama presidency would not display such parochialism. His Iowa victory speech mentioned both the genocide in Darfur and the HIV/AIDS pandemic, issues the other candidates have largely avoided. Obama has also worked with Senator Richard Lugar on a landmark bill to monitor fissile material in the former Soviet Union, and he is the only candidate to reserve the right to act unilaterally in northwest Pakistan, an al-Qaida nerve center.

European newspapers, meanwhile, have reacted excitedly to his message of hope, with Der Berliner Morgenpost of Germany even calling him “Der Neue Kennedy.”

It’s simplistic to say that Obama’s background is entirely responsible for his clear understanding of foreign policy. Earlier this year, Delaware Senator Joe Biden established himself as the strongest candidate on foreign policy before dropping out of the race in February. His strength came not from an immigrant background, but from his decades on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Obama, too, is more than just someone with personal ties to the world community, as his past accomplishments clearly show. Nevertheless, his uniquely international experiences mean that he can relate in a more visceral way to the issues facing the rest of the world, which is certainly a welcome change.

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