WORLD VIEW
Fareed Zakaria
Mccain Vs. Mccain
He seems to think he can magically unite the two main strands in the foreign-policy establishment. He can't.
Amid the din of the dueling democrats, people seem to have forgotten about that other guy in the presidential race—you know, John McCain. McCain is said to be benefiting from this politically because his rivals are tearing each other apart. In fact, few people are paying much attention to what the Republican nominee is saying, or subjecting it to any serious scrutiny.
On March 26, McCain gave a speech on foreign policy in Los Angeles that was billed as his most comprehensive statement on the subject. It contained within it the most radical idea put forward by a major candidate for the presidency in 25 years. Yet almost no one noticed.
In his speech McCain proposed that the United States expel Russia from the G8, the group of advanced industrial countries. Moscow was included in this body in the 1990s to recognize and reward it for peacefully ending the cold war on Western terms, dismantling the Soviet empire and withdrawing from large chunks of the old Russian Empire as well. McCain also proposed that the United States should expand the G8 by taking in India and Brazil—but pointedly excluded China from the councils of power.
We have spent months debating Barack Obama's suggestion that he might, under some circumstances, meet with Iranians and Venezuelans. It is a sign of what is wrong with the foreign-policy debate that this idea is treated as a revolution in U.S. policy while McCain's proposal has barely registered. What McCain has announced is momentous—that the United States should adopt a policy of active exclusion and hostility toward two major global powers. It would reverse a decades-old bipartisan American policy of integrating these two countries into the global order, a policy that began under Richard Nixon (with Beijing) and continued under Ronald Reagan (with Moscow). It is a policy that would alienate many countries in Europe and Asia who would see it as an attempt by Washington to begin a new cold war.
I write this with sadness because I greatly admire John McCain, a man of intelligence, honor and enormous personal and political courage. I also agree with much of what else he said in that speech in Los Angeles. But in recent years, McCain has turned into a foreign-policy schizophrenic, alternating between neoconservative posturing and realist common sense. His speech reads like it was written by two very different people, each one given an allotment of a few paragraphs on every topic.
The neoconservative vision within the speech is essentially an affirmation of ideology. Not only does it declare war on Russia and China, it places the United States in active opposition to all nondemocracies. It proposes a League of Democracies, which would presumably play the role that the United Nations now does, except that all nondemocracies would be cast outside the pale. The approach lacks any strategic framework. What would be the gain from so alienating two great powers? How would the League of Democracies fight terrorism while excluding countries like Jordan, Morocco, Egypt and Singapore? What would be the gain to the average American to lessen our influence with Saudi Arabia, the central banker of oil, in a world in which we are still crucially dependent on that energy source?
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Member Comments
Posted By: lilgirl68 @ 05/09/2008 11:03:47 AM
Comment: i think that the media should talk about McCain wife not turning in her tax report.Mrs.McCain
said on a network show that she will not turn in her tax report because she and her husband
do not file jointly.There is something wron with that picture.
I feel like that the MEDIA let MCCAIN GET PASS THE PRESS.The press should be fair with
everyone and not just run one person through the ground.So be fair report the truth.
Posted By: Driver of wagons @ 05/07/2008 1:53:44 PM
Comment:
It was only a matter of time!
In this one move, the White House ended McCain's accountability for his use or abuse of the primary public financing system while putting him in position to take money for the general.
For this maneuver to have been arranged for the benefit of Senator McCain, of all people--the John McCain who has regularly, severely criticized the FEC as a "corrupt" agency--is a remarkable turn in his career as a reformer. A Commissioner who acted to enforce the law, to just raise an important question of enforcement, has been stripped of his post. This was clearly in Senator McCain's interest, this raw power play. It is also in his interest to have the FEC, back in business minus Mason, arrange for his money for the fall campaign.
He goes on to make a case that's going to be central to Obama's logic for forgoing public financing, despite his pledge to join the system: That McCain is a hypocrite on this reform issue.
For all the time that McCain has savaged the performance of the FEC, he has LED the sizeable crowd of critics who believed that the agency is too beholden, on the whole, to the narrow interests of parties and their candidates. Yesterday, Republicans could not have acted more narrowly in just this vein: effectively firing a Commissioner to immunize their Presidential nominee from enforcement action in a pending case but making sure that there is enough of an agency left to get him the money needed to finance his campaign.
Posted By: middkid06 @ 05/07/2008 11:55:17 AM
Comment: McCain's comments are very shocking and frightening, but I don't think they'll be ignored for much longer. Before November he'll either have to clean up and back-track, like he did with the 100 years comment, or get pummelled by the Democratic nominee.