I know I’ve made this point in various ways in several posts over the last day or so. But watching John McCain speak about the Georgian crisis in the video below should deeply worry anyone interested in a sane US foreign policy — or the safety of their children. One arch joke from the earlier part of this decade was that the one good thing about the neocons obsession with getting into a war with Iraq was that it distracted them from their much bigger obsessions — ratcheting up Cold Wars with China and/or Russia.
The people that are pulling McCain’s strings are the people who want to push us into a new Cold War with the Russians — and ironically and a bit improbably with the Chinese too. But the Russians are probably more willing to oblige us since their power remains limited to oil reserves and military power. In other words, they’re people McCain’s folks can understand and vice versa.
McCain is going out of his way to cast this as a replay of 1938 and 1939. Is it really in our interest to get into a renewed Cold War with Russia right now? Do we have the military resources for a proxy/advisor war in the Caucasus at the moment? Should we find ourselves in the situation where the Russians want to reassert their sway in Eastern Europe, we would have some very serious and consequential decisions to make. But this just is not that. The key is that McCain, both in terms of policy and temperament, wants to court that result.
It’s sort of funny when he’s just an unhinged senator. But think for a moment where we’d be if this man were president right now, as he may well be in six months. This man takes the counsel of the people who got us into the Iraq War. On foreign policy, he is in league with the people who were so extreme they’ve now largely been kicked out of the Bush administration. People like John Bolton and others like him.
It’s beyond Obama or political strategy or dinging McCain on this or that policy.
This man is simply too dangerous and unstable to be president. People need to wake up and get a look of the preview he’s giving us of a McCain presidency.
