McCain's Brain Trust

Other experts say McCain's world view overlaps the agendas of a wide range of Republicans as well as some Democrats. CFR Director of Studies Gary Samore </bios/4643/> describes McCain as an "interesting mix of neoconservative, for lack of a better term, and traditional, middle-of-the road internationalist." He adds that there has been a tradition in both parties of projecting U.S. values globally. "There has been an element in American foreign policy, which has been expressed in both liberal Democratic administrations and conservative Republican administrations, for making the world in our image. That's American. It's just that the latest manifestation has been by a conservative Republican administration."

National Security and Foreign Policy
McCain cites radical Islamic extremists as the transcendent threat facing the country because of what he says is their willingness to use weapons of mass destruction against U.S. targets. McCain said in his March 26 speech in Los Angeles: "This is the central threat of our time, and we must understand the implications our decisions on all manner of regional and global challenges could have for our success in defeating it." The following are identified by the campaign as the main advisers on national security and foreign policy:

Randy Scheunemann. This is the second time he is serving as foreign policy coordinator for a McCain presidential campaign, first filling the role in 2000. Founder in 2001 of Washington consulting firm Orion Strategies LLC, Scheunemann has lengthy experience as a Republican legislative staffer on foreign policy issues including NATO enlargement, UN reform, and ballistic missile defense. In 2002, he founded the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a nongovernmental group that sought to rally support for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the institution of a democratic government in Iraq. Scheunemann has defended the surge plan in Iraq as essential to U.S. objectives in the Middle East. He told a panel at the Brookings Institution in March 2008: "We have an Iranian nuclear program we need to address. We have moderate regimes that are under threat from Iran in its desire for regional hegemony. We have Israel's security to be concerned about. We have the situation in Pakistan and Afghanistan." He added: "Choosing to lose in Iraq will making achieving our goals in any of those other areas far, far more difficult to achieve". An advocate for NATO expansion, he has spoken at campaign forums and in interviews about the need to stand up to Russian challenges on expansion. He told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in April 2008: "If anybody thought you're going to somehow placate the Russians by not giving Georgia and Ukraine [Membership Action Plans], we've seen through the Russian response that, in fact, rather than being placated, they felt emboldened."

Robert Kagan, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, served in the State Department from 1984 to 1988 as a member of the Policy Planning Staff. Kagan and William Kristol coauthored a Foreign Affairs article in summer 1996 that was seen to articulate neoconservative views about U.S. foreign policy. They called for a robust foreign policy in which the United States pursued "benevolent hegemony." They urged the vigorous promotion of U.S. principles around the world through aiding democratic and free-market reforms and in some cases "actively pursuing policies— in Iran, Cuba, or China, for instance—intended ultimately to bring about a change of regime."

In summer 2002, Policy Review published an article by Kagan pointing to a fundamental parting of the ways between Europe and the United States. He wrote that a decline in European military power "has produced a powerful European interest in inhabiting a world where strength doesn't matter, where international law and international institutions predominate, where unilateral action by powerful nations is forbidden, where all nations regardless of their strength have equal rights and are equally protected by commonly agreed-upon international rules of behavior." Kagan said this also amounted to a greater tolerance for threats, including from Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

More recently, Kagan writes in the New Republic about a new great power competition shaping up in the twenty-first century with Russia and China leading the challenge by autocracies to an international political system fashioned by Western-style liberal democracies.