In March 26th, John McCain gave a much-hyped foreign policy speech at the World Affairs Council in Los Angeles. It was his way of signaling both his commitment to restoring America's alliances and his desire to separate himself from the diplomatic blunders of the Bush administration. And it went over like gangbusters. David Broder, dean of the Washington pundit class, gushingly proclaimed the speech was "an implicit rebuke to the mind-set of the current White House" and went so far as to equate it with Barack Obama's speech on race.
"We need to listen to the views and respect the collective will of our democratic allies," McCain said, in an echo of George Bush's 2000 campaign promise to play nice with our friends. "If we're an arrogant nation," Bush said at the time, "they'll resent us; if we're a humble nation, but strong, they'll welcome us." And we all know how that turned out.
Only a press corps so enamored with McCain could imagine that one of the staunchest supporters of the Iraq War would be capable of breaking with the current administration's unilateral adventurism. Despite his conciliatory rhetoric, McCain's hawkish views, and his long history of castigating allies who do not agree with him, leave little reason to believe that when it comes to restoring America's image, credibility, and alliances, he would be much different than George W. Bush. A brief look at these four crucial policy areas explains why.
1. NATO and our democratic allies. Perhaps the greatest window into McCain's ability to deal with America's allies comes from his handling of the rupture that occurred within NATO prior to the start of the Iraq War. The debate over whether to invade was, after all, the greatest diplomatic crisis that America's most critical alliance had faced in its 60 years.
On this front, his record is not good. In fact, some of McCain's statements made those from Donald "Old Europe" Rumsfeld seem tame by comparison. Speaking at an international security conference in Germany a month before the war, a frustrated McCain lashed out at our European allies, calling them "vacuous and posturing." Later that year, in an interview, he referred to the French and Germans as "our adversaries." He said that former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder "looks little like the ally that anchored our presence in Europe throughout the Cold War. ... A German Rip Van Winkle from the 1960s would not understand the lack of political courage and cooperation with its allies on the question of Iraq exhibited in Berlin today." McCain also unleashed on two other critical players, accusing France and Russia of putting their "commercial interests above international law, world peace, and the political ideals of Western civilization."