Sarah Palin took a hard line on Russia and Iran on Thursday as she fielded questions on foreign affairs for the first time since Republican presidential candidate John McCain named her his running mate two weeks ago.
The Alaska governor also reversed her stand on the cause of climate change, telling ABC News that she believes "man's activities certainly can be contributing to the issue of global warming." Less than a year ago, she said the opposite.
By turns tense and combative, Palin, 44, used two interviews with ABC anchor Charles Gibson to display her grasp of issues central to the vice presidency.
She acknowledged that, other than a trip last year to see troops in Iraq, Kuwait and Germany, her only visits abroad were to Mexico and Canada. And she said that she had never met a head of state but that she did speak last week with President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia.
The interviews, conducted in and around Fairbanks, Alaska, did not go without a hitch. Palin called the Russian incursion into Georgia last month "unprovoked," a view at odds with that of U.S. officials who have reviewed events leading up to the military action.
She also appeared stumped when Gibson asked whether she agreed with the Bush Doctrine, which holds that the United States can wage preemptive war against hostile nations.
And Palin, whose critics see her as unqualified for the vice presidency, said she was "thankful that, under Reagan, we won the Cold War." The Soviet Union collapsed three years after Ronald Reagan left the White House.
The interviews were Palin's first since she spoke with People magazine on the day McCain put her on the Republican ticket. Top McCain advisors -- including chief strategist Steve Schmidt -- traveled with Palin to Alaska on Wednesday to brief her for the two Gibson interviews on Thursday and one today.
Palin has proved a powerful asset for McCain, giving him a sudden boost in the polls, and advisors were determined to avert any misstep that could change those dynamics.
Palin's shift on global warming aligns her more closely with McCain, who has long believed that greenhouse gases contribute to climate change. In December, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner quoted her as saying, "I'm not an Al Gore, doom-and-gloom environmentalist blaming the changes in our climate on human activity."
Palin, in speaking to ABC, chose her words carefully, saying that "some of man's activities" could be "potentially causing some of the changes in the climate right now."
