The presumptive Republican Presidential candidate, Senator John McCain, has started telling Europeans that his White House will want effective teamwork with its European allies - a marked change from the way in which the Bush administration often seems to brush them off.

In his concept, the key word of a stronger transatlantic partnership is “together” - with a new emphasis on U.S. readiness to be “willing to be persuaded by” European allies in order to get united action by democracies in Europe and the rest of the world.

A key U.S.-European cleavage - over Iraq - is unlikely to be healed by a McCain presidency. He has consistently supported the war in Iraq and argued for deeper, longer American involvement, not less. Even now in calling for more powerful U.S.-EU cooperation, McCain may dismay some Europeans with his emphasis on hard military power over the soft power options that many allies feel were scandalously neglected by the current Republican incumbent in the White House.

But McCain’s program had much to please members of the European Union. His overall approach sounded like a radical break with many key unilateralist tenets of the Bush administration. And McCain renewed his criticism of the ways in which the Iraq war was fought, reiterating his opposition to torture and his call for closure of the Guantanamo detention center. And he embraced other policy themes championed in Europe, notably in calling for a “cap-and-trade” system to deal with carbon emissions and fight global warming.

His stance is the first detailed foreign-policy presentation on Europe by any of the leading U.S. presidential candidates. The two other top contenders, Senator Hilary Clinton and Senator Barack Obama, are still engaged in the primary campaigns of the Democratic Party’s nomination - a stage where interest focuses mainly on domestic issues.

As soon as McCain sealed the Republican nomination, he started an overseas swing, including a visit in Iraq, to enhance his credentials as a statesman. Earlier this week, ahead of his stopovers in Europe, his long op-ed appeared in Le Monde, France’s leading newspaper. The piece also appeared in Britain’s Financial Times.

Its keynote was a call for united action against global threats. “We need to strengthen our transatlantic alliance as the core of a new global compact - a League of Democracies - that can harness the great power of the more than 100 democratic nations around the world to advance our values and defend our shared values,” he wrote.

Sketching this collective international will in a new era, McCain said that the U.S., once the only democratic superpower, now could work with the “powerful collective voice of the EU, India, Japan, Australia, Brazil, South Korea, South Africa, Turkey and Israel.”

In Russia, he said, democracy has been “temporarily suppressed,” but it was in everyone’s interest to see such a great nation return soon to the democratic path.

Perhaps significantly, the United Nations was not mentioned in his editorial.

Read the English text of McCain’s op-ed at the Financial Times.
The French version is available at Le Monde.

TESTED OVER TIME

By DAVID BROOKS

Published: March 28, 2008, New York Times

Barack Obama says: “John McCain is determined to carry out four more years of George Bush’s failed policies.” Obama is a politician, so it’s normal that he’d choose to repeat the lines that some of his followers want to hear. But before people buy that argument, I’d ask them to read three speeches.

The first was delivered by McCain on Sept. 28, 1983. The Reagan administration was seeking Congressional authorization to support the deployment of U.S. Marines in Lebanon. McCain, a freshman legislator, decided to oppose his president and party.

McCain argued that Lebanese society, as it existed then, could not be stabilized and unified by American troops. He made a series of concrete observations about the facts on the ground. Lebanon was in a state of de facto partition. The Lebanese Army would not soon be strong enough to drive out the Syrians. The American presence would not intimidate the Syrians into negotiating.

“I do not foresee obtainable objectives in Lebanon.” He concluded. “I believe the longer we stay, the more difficult it will be to leave, and I am prepared to accept the consequences of our withdrawal.”

This was not the speech of a man who thinks military force is the answer to every problem. It was the speech of one who conforms policies to facts. And it came a month before a terrorist attack that killed 241 Americans.

The second speech was delivered on Nov. 5, 2003. This was not a grand strategy speech. It was a critique of the execution of existing U.S. policy.

First, McCain wondered about the Pentagon’s publicity campaign in Iraq: “When, in the course of days, we increase by thousands our estimate of the numbers of Iraqis trained, it sounds like somebody is cooking the books.”

He then pointed out that the U.S. had not committed sufficient troops. He called for a counterinsurgency strategy in which U.S. forces would actually hold secure territory. “Simply put,” he said, “there does not appear to be a strategy behind our current force levels in Iraq, other than to preserve the illusion that we have sufficient forces in place to meet our objectives.”

He excoriated the arrogance of Paul Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority: “The C.P.A. seems to think that all wisdom is made in America, and that the Iraqi people were defeated, not liberated.”

This was the speech of a man, adjusting to changing circumstances, who was calling on the administration to adjust quickly as well.

The third McCain speech was delivered on Wednesday. It is as personal, nuanced and ambitious a speech as any made by a presidential candidate this year.

McCain noted that we are not only fighting a war on terror. The world is seeing a growing split between liberal democracies and growing autocracies. We are seeing a world in which great power rivalries — with China, Russia and Iran — have to be managed and soothed.

Moreover, the U.S. is not the sole hegemon. Power is widely distributed among many rising nations. McCain’s core purpose in the speech was to revive the foreign policy tradition that has jumped parties but that has been associated with people like Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Stimson, Dean Acheson, John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan.

In this tradition, a strong America is the key to world peace, but America’s role is as a leading player in an international system. America didn’t defeat communism, McCain said Wednesday, the American-led global community did. This is the tradition that Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment has been describing for a decade.

McCain offered to build new pillars for that system — a League of Democracies, a new nuclear nonproliferation regime and a successor to the Kyoto treaty. In stabilizing Asia and the Middle East, he would rely more on democracies like Turkey, India, Israel and Iraq, and less on Mubarak and Musharraf.

Unlike the realists, McCain believes other nations have to be judged according to how they treat their own citizens. Unlike the Bush administration in its first few years, he believes global treaties cannot solely be evaluated according to a narrow definition of the American interest. The U.S. also has to protect the fabric of the international system.

McCain opened his speech with a description of his father leaving home on the day of Pearl Harbor, and then being gone for much of the next four years. He harkened back repeatedly to the accomplishments of the Truman administration.

In so doing, he signaled that the foreign policy debate of the coming months will be very different from the one of the past six years. Anybody who thinks McCain is merely continuing the Bush agenda is not paying attention.

Tags: 2008 Election, EU, McCain, Politics, u.s.

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