He seems to think he can magically unite the two main strands in the foreign-policy establishment. He can’t.
Fareed Zakaria NEWSWEEK
Apr 26, 2008
Amid
the din of the dueling democrats, people seem to have forgotten about
that other guy in the presidential race—you know, John McCain. McCain
is said to be benefiting from this politically because his rivals are
tearing each other apart. In fact, few people are paying much attention
to what the Republican nominee is saying, or subjecting it to any
serious scrutiny.
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.
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. 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.
I write
this with sadness because I greatly admire John McCain, a man of
intelligence, honor and enormous personal and political courage. I also
agree with much of what else he said in that speech in Los Angeles. But
in recent years, McCain has turned into a foreign-policy schizophrenic,
alternating between neoconservative posturing and realist common sense.
His speech reads like it was written by two very different people, each
one given an allotment of a few paragraphs on every topic.
The
neoconservative vision within the speech is essentially an affirmation
of ideology. Not only does it declare war on Russia and China, it
places the United States in active opposition to all nondemocracies. It
proposes a League of Democracies, which would presumably play the role
that the United Nations now does, except that all nondemocracies would
be cast outside the pale. The approach lacks any strategic framework.
What would be the gain from so alienating two great powers? How would
the League of Democracies fight terrorism while excluding countries
like Jordan, Morocco, Egypt and Singapore? What would be the gain to
the average American to lessen our influence with Saudi Arabia, the
central banker of oil, in a world in which we are still crucially
dependent on that energy source?
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.
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?