President McCain in Russia
In case there was any lingering doubt, President Obama's trip to Russia should remind Americans how fortunate they are not to have placed John McCain in the White House. In Moscow on the eve of the G-8 summit, Obama has helped ratchet down tensions with Russia while securing preliminary agreements on mutual cuts to nuclear warheads and delivery systems, as well as getting the green light to use Russian territory to resupply U.S. forces in Afghanistan. For his part, just last year John McCain was promising to eject Russia from the G-8 and proclaiming, "We're all Georgians now."
No doubt, President McCain's initial meeting with Russian President Medvedev would have been a frosty one. After all, as he made clear time and again, he would have blackballed Medvedev from the G-8 gathering in Italy this week.
In November 2007, candidate McCain penned an article in Foreign Affairs in which he announced his intent to expel Russia from the G-8. In a March 26, 2008 speech, he made his plan crystal clear:
"We should start by ensuring that the G-8, the group of eight highly industrialized states, becomes again a club of leading market democracies: it should include Brazil and India but exclude Russia."
But facing almost universal condemnation from foreign policy analysts who characterized booting Russia from the G-8 as logistically impossible and just plain "dumb," the McCain campaign quickly disowned it. On June 25, 2008, Reuters reported that an anonymous McCain adviser claimed the policy towards Russia was no longer operative:
He also dismissed McCain's comment last October on Russia and the G-8 as "a holdover from an earlier period," adding: "It doesn't reflect where he is right now."
Yet one month later, John McCain was back on the trail, calling once again for Moscow to get the heave-ho. Appearing on ABC This Week with George Stephanopolous on July 27, McCain insisted it was back on:
STEPHANOPOULOS: Let me ask you about your position to exclude Russia from the G-8. How are you going to get that done? Every other G-8 nation is against it.
MCCAIN: Well, you have to take positions whether other nations agree or not, because you have to do what's best for America...
Of course, more important to John McCain was what was best for John McCain. So looking for political advantage as Russian and Georgian forces clashed the following month, McCain took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to declare, "We Are All Georgians." Two days earlier, Americans might remember, McCain announced to Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili on their behalf:
"I told him that I know I speak for every American when I say to him, 'Today we are all Georgians.'"
Given the recent unrest in Iran, the growing protests in that former Soviet republic have largely been off Americans' radar screens. As Reuters reported, President Saakashvili lashed out over the weeks of opposition marches and calls for resignation over "his record on democracy and last year's disastrous war with Russia":
"They think Saakashvili is hot-headed, they insult (parliament speaker David) Bakradze and (Prime Minister Nika) Gilauri, and they try to make us crush them," he told a televised meeting of the parliamentary majority.
On Tuesday, President Obama is scheduled to meet with Prime Minster Vladimir Putin, the former KGB chieftain turned autocrat widely viewed as still pulling the strings in the Kremlin. But while Obama in the run-up to his trip criticized what he deemed Putin's "old Cold War approaches", a McCain-Putin meeting would have proven more awkward still, given what he saw in his eyes.
Back in the 2001, Senator McCain was asked by Chris Matthews about President Bush's meeting with Putin in which Bush famously remarked that he had "looked the man in the eye" and got "a sense of his soul." Bush, McCain responded, earned "very high marks."
"The president did a good job in his European trip...On Russia, I d-I give him very high marks...I-I give him an A. I'd give him an A."
Alas, as he approached the presidential election of 2008, John McCain took a different view of Bush's personal diplomacy - and Vladimir Putin. As McCain put it in 2007 and repeatedly throughout the campaign:
"When I looked into Putin's eyes and I saw three letters: a K, a G and a B."
Whatever John McCain saw in the window to Putin's soul, his public comments were hardly the stuff of public statesmanship. But as his France-bashing and Iran saber rattling show, McCain's grandstanding extends to both friend and foe, and everyone in between. And as the G-8 this week discusses the crisis in Tehran, somewhere McCain will be singing, "bomb bomb Iran."
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McCain to Russia: Get off my lawn!
Posted by Dennis on July 6, 2009 7:19 PM