2008: The Battle-Weary Foreign Policy Soul of John McCain
September 5th, 2008 by Matt
Is yesterday’s New York Times, David Sanger had a brief analysis piece on the continuing battle for John McCain’s foreign policy soul (or “heart” in this case), a war of attrition that has raged since McCain’s grip on the Republican nomination became unshakeable many months ago. In this special convention edition, Sanger quotes McCain “hero” Henry Kissinger, who, in a speech this week, “urged the next president to go slow on promoting democracy around the world”. Kissinger, referencing China’s rise, alluded to the Nixon administration’s strategy with the Soviet Union, which was “not to democratize them, but to normalize them.”
Sanger also calls on Richard Haass, who labels the democracy vs. stability argument “the single most important fault line in American foreign policy today.”
Sanger’s conclusion is that it’s still difficult to categorize McCain’s foreign policy philosophy. And so the struggle endures.
Posted in Democracy Promotion, Election 08, US foreign policy, US politics |
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September 22nd, 2008 at 6:37 pm
[…] Much has been made throughout the campaign about the supposed battle for John McCain’s foreign policy soul. Is he a realist at heart, or a staunch neoconservative? Dave Weigel asks a similar question for Reason, but focuses instead on Barack Obama’s foreign policy. Obama, in Weigel’s analysis, is not the “progressive realist” that many believe him to be, but rather a rigid, committed liberal interventionist. Weigel warns that wide-ranging interventionism of the liberal variety can cause equally destructive blowback to what we’ve seen from the Bush administration’s experiments with neoconservatism. […]