The LA Times ran a solid report about a month ago, noting that when it comes to foreign policy, John McCain’s record is littered with “mixed signals” and contradictory positions. That’s true — foreign policy “realists” who are looking for signs of hope can point to McCain’s opposition to extending Reagan’s troop deployment in Lebanon in 1983 and his initial hesitation about going to war with Saddam Hussein after he invaded Kuwait in 1990. This McCain bears little resemblance to the current McCain.
But the New York Times reports today that these contradictions have led both Republican camps — realists and neocons — to believe they can help shape the malleable McCain worldview. The Times noted that pragmatists are “expressing concern” that the senator is slipping away.
The concerns have emerged in the weeks since Mr. McCain became his party’s presumptive nominee and began more formally assembling a list of foreign policy advisers. Among those on the list are several prominent neoconservatives, including Robert Kagan, an author who helped write much of the foreign policy speech that Mr. McCain delivered in Los Angeles on March 26, in which he described himself as “a realistic idealist.” Others include the security analyst Max Boot and a former United Nations ambassador, John R. Bolton.
Prominent members of the pragmatist group, often called realists, say they are also wary of the McCain campaign’s chief foreign policy aide, Randy Scheunemann, who was a foreign policy adviser to former Senators Trent Lott and Bob Dole and who has longtime ties to neoconservatives. […]
“It maybe too strong a term to say a fight is going on over John McCain’s soul,” said Lawrence Eagleburger, a secretary of state under the first President George Bush, who is a member of the pragmatist camp. “But if it’s not a fight, I am convinced there is at least going to be an attempt. I can’t prove it, but I’m worried that it’s taking place.”
Actually, it’s not. If there was a fight, the realists lost a long time ago. The Times article suggests there’s a real tension that exists with the McCain camp, but if there is a conflict, it’s not the product of ideological uncertainty.
Mr. McCain, who is aware of the concerns, told reporters on his campaign plane early this week that he took foreign policy advice from a wide variety of people. “Some of them are viewed as ‘more conservative,’ quote,” he said, adding, “but I do have a broad array of people that I talk to, and hear from, and read what they write.”
How open-minded of him. The truth, though, is that McCain isn’t on the fence, at least not anymore. Matthew Duss explained:
The competition for McCain’s foreign policy soul is over. The neocons cleaned up, took the trophy, and went for beers (or maybe wine spritzers.) Of course McCain is still going to seek and take advice from a gallery of venerated foreign policy wise men, but the idea that there’s actually a conflict between the neocon and realist camps for John McCain’s attention is nonsense. Not only has John McCain long pitched his tent in the neoconservative camp, he advocates a view of American power diametrically opposed to the realism of people like Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft, whose pragmatic approach the neocons have derided in the past as an ideology of “managed decline.”
In a 2006 article tracking McCain’s foreign policy views, John Judis wrote that, starting in 1998, McCain began to “place his new interventionist instincts within a larger ideological framework. That ideological framework was neoconservatism.” […]
Unlike Bush, who came into office without having really thought much about foreign policy (apart from having derided “nation-building” during the campaign) and then landed upon neoconservatism after casting about for a suitable ideological framework for his post-9/11 vengeance policy, McCain derives his strong views on the vigorous and unconstrained exercise of American power from a righteous belief in American “national greatness.”
Jacob Heilbrunn added in January, “McCain represents for the neocons the ultimate synthesis of war hero and politician. And McCain, in turn, has been increasingly drawn to the neocons’ militaristic vision of the U.S. as an empire that can set wrong aright around the globe…. If McCain becomes president, the neocons will be in charge.”
I’m surprised the Times would even characterize this as a question. Look who has McCain’s ear and tell me he’s not a neocon. As Matt Yglesias concluded, “[Y]ou’ll find that McCain Senate and campaign staffs both contain a ton of people whose resumes include stints at The Weekly Standard and/or the Project for a New American Century — that’s the network he’s tied into.”
And that’s who’ll be shaping foreign policy in a McCain administration.