The presumptive GOP nominee for president, McCain ... has adopted a surprising diversity of views on foreign policy issues during his 25 years in Congress. It is a pattern that brings uncertainty to the path he would take if elected.It is true that McCain's views on America's international role have been complicated and diverse, but the Arizona Senator's more firm today - on the nation's goodness in the world and on the priority of protecting American national security - than ever. Thus, it's simply not accurate to announce we'd see an "uncertain path" in foreign policy under a McCain administration.
What's interesting about this notion of McCain's international uncertainty is that our enemies aren't buying it, nor are our domestic surrender hawks, who're suggesting McCain makes Curtis LeMay look like a choir boy:
...McCain may deviate from right-wing dogma on discrete issues when it comes to domestic policy questions. But on questions of foreign policy, national security and war, McCain ... [is] as extremist as it gets in the mainstream political spectrum. On those obviously central issues, there simply is nobody and nothing to the Right of McCain.Why the soft-peddling in the mainstream media and the radical left's demonization? Apparently McCain's breaking the molds of conventional foreign policy thinking, which befuddles the corporate press and enrages our most implacable left-wing appeasement advocates.
The reality, however, as was seen in last week's major foreign policy address, is that McCain's unflinching support for Iraq, and his essential belief in the promise of an international concert of great democratic powers, offers a compelling vision of American international leadership in the post-Bush era.
This is John McCain's democratic realism, as Joseph Loconte points out, at the Weekly Standard:
JOHN MCCAIN'S FIRST MAJOR foreign policy speech as the presumed Republican nominee for president, delivered last week in Los Angeles, was widely viewed as an effort to distance himself from President George W. Bush. The Washington Post said his agenda "contrasts sharply" with the "go-it-alone approach" of the Bush administration. London's Telegraph discerned a "more practical, less ideological approach" to the war on terror. Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh accused McCain of rejecting America's superpower status and "pandering to the hate-America crowd." New York Times columnist David Brooks claimed that unlike Bush, McCain wants to "protect the fabric of the international system."
The flabbiness of these critiques, though, becomes apparent when McCain's speech is read carefully and alongside his other foreign policy statements. For starters, McCain shows little interest in the "fabric" of an alleged "international system"--a concept as coherent as tapioca pudding--and even less interest in protecting it.
In fact, McCain seems intent on either shaking up existing international organizations--making sure the G-8 remains a club of market democracies by keeping Russia out, for example--or creating new ones. He calls for the formation of a "new global compact" of democratic nations, a "coalition for peace and freedom." McCain envisions a "League of Democracies" which can "harness the vast influence of the more than one hundred democratic nations around the world to advance our values and defend our shared interest." In a recent article in Foreign Affairs, he explained that U.S. soldiers are serving in Afghanistan with British, Canadian, Dutch, German, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, Spanish, and Turkish troops from the NATO alliance--all democratic states. Yet they lack an overarching set of political and economic priorities to meet today's challenges.
McCain's League of Democracies, to be convened and led by the United States, would function under a new political rubric. In his Foreign Affairs article, he writes that the organization could offer "united democratic action" to confront threats and crises whenever the United Nations failed to do so--failures, of course, as predictable and plentiful as cicadas in summertime. In his speech to the World Affairs Council, McCain notably made no reference to the United Nations or the U.N. Security Council. So much for the delicate fabric of the global community.
In his attention to America's allies, McCain insists he is a realist--the United States simply cannot overcome global challenges on its own. It requires the help of the world's democratic states, including the European Union (most of whose members belong to NATO), India, Japan, South Korea and others. Moreover, he argues, political and military power is no longer concentrated in the United States as it was during the Cold War. "We cannot build an enduring peace based on freedom by ourselves, and we do not want to," he said. "We need to listen to the views and respect the collective will of our democratic allies. When we believe international action is necessary, whether military, economic, or diplomatic, we will try to persuade our friends that we are right. But we, in return, must be willing to be persuaded by them." Exhibit A for the McCain doctrine might be Afghanistan. Five years after the United States toppled the Taliban and routed al Qaeda, they remain a dangerous source of instability in the country. American and British forces, wearied and overstretched, are doing most of the fighting because other NATO members have declined to step up. Yes, alliances matter.
Nevertheless, many conservatives balk at McCain's conciliatory tone. His speech was "just pandering to the people who think we're the problem in the world," Limbaugh complained. "The United States is the solution to the problems of the world." The notion, though, that America could happily manage without friends or alliances is not just hubris; it is the well-worn path to decline--political, economic, and moral. "The tyrant is a child of Pride who drinks from his great sickening cup recklessness and vanity," wrote Sophocles, "until from his high crest headlong he plummets to the dust of hope."
Is McCain's democracy agenda a stark departure from the Bush doctrine? In the fall of 2003, Bush announced a new "forward strategy of freedom" for the Middle East: an end to America's Cold War compromise with illiberal Arab regimes for the sake of stability. McCain equally rejects the "realist" bargain; it only helped to produce "a perfect storm of intolerance and hatred." His alternative: "We must help expand the power and reach of freedom" in the Middle East, using every diplomatic tool available. "It is the democracies of the world," he argues, "that will provide the pillars upon which we can and must build an enduring peace." In a judgment that is anathema to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, McCain thus binds the struggles in Afghanistan and Iraq to America's political destiny. "Whether they eventually become stable democracies themselves, or are allowed to sink back into chaos and extremism, will determine not only the fate of that critical part of the world, but our fate, as well."
In this, McCain subscribes to a view of America's national security interests in sync not only with the Bush administration, but also with any honest reading of the bi-partisan 9/11 Commission Report. America faces a global threat from religious extremists determined to acquire weapons of mass destruction to use against civilian populations. They seek the help of rogue nations that share what McCain calls "the same animating hatred for the West." Neither diplomacy nor changes in policy can temper these hatreds. "This is the central threat of our time," he said, "and we must understand the implications of our decisions on all manner of regional and global challenges could have for our success in defeating it."
In other words, the "transcendent challenge" of radical jihadism, as McCain puts it repeatedly, is the lens through which the next U.S. president must view American foreign policy. Any contender for the office who rejects this doctrine, he reasons, "does not deserve to sit in the White House."
That's right, they don't deserve to occupy the White House, because the U.S. today needs unflinching leadership and resolve in the next commander-in-chief, who will direct American national security policy in an age of shifting power dynamics in world affairs, marked with special emphasis by Islam's battle against the West.
Retreating from Iraq (Clinton and Obama) or playing nice with our enemies (Obama) is the last thing the country needs right now, despite the arguments of left's irretrievable defeatists.
See also, Charles Krauthammer,"Democratic Realism:An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World."
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