McCain's Schizophrenic Foreign Policy

[w¡n9Nµ7 §£@¥€r 123]

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.

...

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.

...

In recent years, McCain has turned into a foreign-policy schizophrenic, alternating between neoconservative posturing and realist common sense.

...

McCain appears to think that he can magically unite the two main strands in the Republican foreign-policy establishment. But he can't. This is not about personalities but about two philosophically divergent views of international affairs. Put together, they will produce infighting and incoherence. We have seen this movie before. We have watched an American president unable to choose between his ideologically driven vice president and his pragmatic secretary of State—and the result was the catastrophe of George W. Bush's first term. Twenty-five years earlier, we watched another president who believed that he could encompass the entire spectrum of foreign policy. He, too, gave speeches that were drafted by advisers with divergent world views: in that case, Cyrus Vance and Zbigniew Brzezinski. It led to the paralyzing internal battles of the Carter years. Does John McCain want to try this experiment one more time?

http://www.newsweek.com/id/134317

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

I'm actually wondering if McC is actually coming up with his own policy initiatives or if he's leaving it up to his advisors to tell him what positions to take.

[w¡n9Nµ7 §£@¥€r 123]

I'm actually wondering if McC is actually coming up with his own policy initiatives or if he's leaving it up to his advisors to tell him what positions to take.

Sound familiar?

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

I'm actually wondering if McC is actually coming up with his own policy initiatives or if he's leaving it up to his advisors to tell him what positions to take.

Sound familiar?

Yep.