Opinion: The phony feud between Putin and McCain
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When Russian President Vladimir Putin this weekend blasted the United States for trying to create a ‘unipolar world’ (which The Times editorialized about today), and for perpetrating ‘an almost uncontained hyper use of force -- military force -- in international relations,’ one of the ‘stone-faced’ Americans seething in the audience was Republican presidential hopeful John McCain.
Predictably, the fiercely patriotic and famously short-fused Arizona senator lashed right back, warning that ‘In today’s multipolar world, there is no place for needless confrontation, and I would hope that Russia’s leaders would realize and understand this truth.’
It almost seemed like the two great ex-Cold War soldiers disagreed. But don’t be fooled -- Putin benefits enormously from exaggerating the dastardly menace of the all-powerful Yank, since it taps into Russia’s nationalist insecurities while giving his beleaguered citizens a foreign object for their considerable domestic frustrations. And McCain, just like his namesake father and grandfather before him, has been fighting for an American-led unipolar world all his adult life. Read more McCainia, after the jump.
It’s well-known that John S. McCain Sr. and Jr. were both four-star admirals in the U.S. Navy, instilling in our favorite straight-talker his deep sense of service, honor and patriotism. What’s much less appreciated is that both men were hands-on advocates for the same kind of unipolar American supremacy that Vladimir Putin now rails against.
McCain’s dad was known as ‘Mr. Seapower’ -- not because he commanded the entire Pacific Fleet during the Vietnam War, but because he gave popular lectures stateside about the primal importance of a great navy in asserting global dominance. He was a great admirer of the British Empire, his favorite poem Oscar Wilde’s imperialist apologia Ave Imperatrix, and the main theme of his speeches was that if we didn’t act fast, Soviet seapower would soon eclipse America’s. As his son would later put it in Faith of My Fathers:
My father rose to high command when communism had replaced fascism as the dominant threat to American security. He hated it fiercely and dedicated himself to its annihilation. He believed that we were locked inescapably in a life-and-death struggle with the Soviets. One side or the other would ultimately win total victory, and seapower would prove critical to the outcome.
McCain’s grandfather was also intimately familiar with the connection between seapower and imperialism, having ridden on Teddy Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet world tour, an excercise that his grandson would later describe as making ‘possible the expansion of American power in our hemisphere and beyond,’ and ‘a declaration to Europe and Japan that America had arrived as a major world power, capable of projecing its power to the farthest reaches of the earth, and ... a challenge to Japanese ambitions for supremacy in the Pacific.’
Teddy Roosevelt, McCain’s great hero, was not so interested in a ‘multipolar’ world; on the contrary, it was his ‘messianic belief in ourselves as the New Jerusalem’ -- plus the willingness to use force to back it up -- that McCain so admires. American exceptionalism -- again, backed by a supremacy-seeking military -- is a central tenet to the senator’s beliefs, as evidenced by some of his favorite phrases -- the ‘last, best hope of earth,’ the ‘indispensable nation,’ the ‘shining city on a hill,’ and so on.
And, as this perceptive November 2006 John Judis profile of the candidate’s foreign policy evolution illustrates, McCain somewhere in the mid-to-late 1990s became the most influential senatorial advocate for the neoconservative, Putin-scaring policy of rogue state rollback, in which every tinpot dictator is put on notice that a righteous Uncle Sam may at any point swoop down and make the world more safe for democracy. (McCain co-sponsored the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, and has directed belligerent talk against North Korea, Iran, and several other repressed states.)
The great irony in this weekend’s Putin-McCain back-and-forth, is that the Russian leader’s main point about rollback effected by a lone superpower --
[O]f course this is extremely dangerous. It results in the fact that no one feels safe. I want to emphasise this – no one feels safe! Because no one can feel that international law is like a stone wall that will protect them. Of course such a policy stimulates an arms race. The force’s dominance inevitably encourages a number of countries to acquire weapons of mass destruction.
-- seemed to sail right over the head of the guy who, if elected president, might be that policy’s greatest proponent in 100 years. McCain responded Putin’s charge that the U.S. is seeking unipolarity by stating that the Cold War was won by an alliance (what this has to do with the 2007 White House is unclear), and then bashing Putin’s eminently bashable (but ultimately irrelevant to the question) misrule:
Will Russia’s autocratic turn become more pronounced, its foreign policy more opposed to the principles of the western democracies and its energy policy used as a tool of intimidation? Or will it build, in partnership with the West, a democratic country that contributes to the international rules-based system? While our hopes are obviously for the latter choice, recent events suggest a turn toward the former. This is unfortunate, and the U.S. and Europe need to take today’s Russian realities into account as we form our policies.
An equally relevant question might be, will McCain ever even consider that an unconstrained United States, rampaging across the globe in the name of freedom, might trigger an arms race, decrease goodwill toward America, or at least cause some autocratic leaders to grumble menacingly to sustained applause?