Meet John 'Dubya' McCain

John McCain knows a lot less about foreign policy than he'd have us believe.

This, anyway, is the impression that's been growing in recent weeks, not least because of much-discussed New York Times story published recently that painted a growing divide in his campaign between "pragmatists" and "neoconservatives." The candidate reportedly lacks firm ideological convictions, so battle for "McCain's soul" may be in the offing.

And it's true: Despite his decades of supposed national security experience, it's difficult to stick an "-ism" on the tail of McCain's approach to world affairs. He's been one of the president's most fervent backers on Iraq, and yet he has also criticized the unilateralist tendencies that led the United States to war without key allies. During the 1990s, he opposed U.S. intervention in Somalia, Haiti and Bosnia, but he knocked President Clinton for his unwillingness to commit ground troops to Kosovo. Even on Vietnam -- the intervention about which one suspects he has thought the most -- McCain has both asserted that the war was winnable and also questioned whether we could have succeeded.

But in truth, McCain's foreign policy is far more consistent than it seems. Much like George W. Bush, McCain sees the world in oppositional terms -- us versus them, and good versus evil.

McCain speaks often of taking the lead "in fighting this transcendent issue of our time: the battle and struggle against radical Islamic extremism." To him, it is a "transcendent struggle between good and evil." This alone tells us much of what we need to know.

A Manichaean or dualistic approach to foreign policy has a long pedigree in American history, stretching back to the 1600s, when early settlers proclaimed their adopted home a New Israel, a God-ordained refuge from the sins of the Old World.

Conservatives like Barry Goldwater, who nevertheless insisted on defining the Cold War as a literal battle between good and evil, came to dangerous conclusions.
They saw the bipartisan policy of containment as apostasy because it implied long-term coexistence with communism -- that is, with evil. They rejected negotiations with Moscow because one did not strike deals with the devil, and they derided international organizations because they required some degree of diplomatic deference to states that remained neutral in the face of communism. They even attacked the concept of mutual assured destruction, preferring a war-fighting strategy that would enable us to "win" a nuclear exchange.

I beg to differ. As I see it, the conclusions reached by "conservatives like Barry Goldwater" were sensible, while those reached by the liberal internationalists of Scoblic's ilk were the more dangerous.

As early as the 1950's, containment began to fail as the Soviets began to penetrate the Middle East and, through Cuba's Castro regime establish a beachhead in our own hemisphere. By the time Reagan took office, pro-Soviet regimes had been established in Afghanistan, Indochina, Africa, and Latin America. In addition, the Soviets had built a blue-water navy, with naval bases around the world, and Moscow was arming the Arabs and promoting terrorism. Indeed, it appeared that the Soviets were winning the Cold War the day Reagan took office.

As for negotiations with Moscow, Reagan, a "conservative like Barry Goldwater" actually did quite well. His success in negotiationg the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces treaty stands in contrast to the rather spotty track record of his predecessors--from Tehran in 1943 through Vienna in 1961 to SALT II in 1979--in their dealings with the Soviets.

International organizations? Which ones, other than NATO, have made a significant contribution to the world's peace, security, and well-being?

And the concept of "mutual assured destruction," or MAD (which, by the way, was never a military strategy) gave us the option of suicide or surrender should deterrence fail. Incidentally, the Soviets utterly rejected MAD, while developing strategies and designing their armed forces to fight and win a nuclear war. For example, the Soviets deployed thousands of surface-to-air missile (SAM)launchers, many of which had anti-ballistic missile capability, whereas the US removed most of its SAM sites in the 1960's. Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative ultimatily did more to curb the nuclear arms race than did MAD.

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