When John McCain delivered his high-profile speech on his foreign policy vision about a month ago, the usual suspects swooned. The NYT’s David Brooks said it was “as personal, nuanced and ambitious a speech as any made by a presidential candidate this year.” He was especially impressed with McCain’s perspective on how best to treat some of the country’s biggest rivals: “McCain noted that we are not only fighting a war on terror. The world is seeing a growing split between liberal democracies and growing autocracies. We are seeing a world in which great power rivalries — with China, Russia and Iran — have to be managed and soothed.”
Likewise, the WaPo’s David Broder was predictably impressed, arguing that McCain’s vision “might heal the wounds left here at home and abroad by the past seven years.”
In the new issue of Newsweek, Fareed Zakaria has a more detailed look at how McCain specifically perceives the future of U.S. relations with China and Russia.
[McCain’s] 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.
Quite right, there is an odd imbalance in the discourse. When Obama addresses international issues, he’s looked at with a skeptical eye. So, when he suggests he would not use nuclear weapons to attack al Qaeda camps along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, it’s perceived as some kind of gaffe. When he raises the specter of discussions with rival heads of state, the establishment feels comfortable questioning his foreign policy judgment.
But when McCain talks openly about poking China and Russia with a large point stick, the establishment thinks, “Well, he’s John McCain. He must know what he’s talking about.”
The consequences of his vision deserve to be scrutinized in far more detail.
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. […]
The single most important security problem that the United States faces is securing loose nuclear materials. A terrorist group can pose an existential threat to the global order only by getting hold of such material. We also have an interest in stopping proliferation, particularly by rogue regimes like Iran and North Korea. To achieve both of these core objectives — which would make American safe and the world more secure — we need Russian cooperation. How fulsome is that likely to be if we gratuitously initiate hostilities with Moscow? Dissing dictators might make for a stirring speech, but ordinary Americans will have to live with the complications after the applause dies down.
To reorder the G8 without China would be particularly bizarre. The G8 was created to help coordinate problems of the emerging global economy. Every day these problems multiply — involving trade, pollution, currencies — and are in greater need of coordination. To have a body that attempts to do this but excludes the world’s second largest economy is to condemn it to failure and irrelevance. International groups are not cheerleading bodies but exist to help solve pressing global crises. Excluding countries won’t make the problems go away.
Zakaria, whose work I generally like, is pretty widely respected among the chattering class, so it’s my hope that a column like this will at least put a kernel of doubt in the minds of those who assume McCain is credible and knowledgeable on foreign policy. He isn’t.
As for the politics, in the grand scheme of things, McCain’s intention to spark a new round of hostilities with China and Russia is more than a little weightier than whether Barack Obama might pursue diplomacy with Ahmadinejad.