The Presidential Candidates’ Foreign Policy Statements: John McCain

by CKR

Continuing my series on foreign policy statements by the presidential candidates, here’s my short version of John McCain’s statement in Foreign Affairs. Same ground rules. Read McCain’s essay. Links to previous posts in this series can be found here, along with links to other information on the candidates that I find useful.

Winning the War on Terror
• We must succeed in Iraq. I oppose a preemptive withdrawal strategy that has no Plan B.
• Recommit to Afghanistan by increasing NATO forces, suspending restrictions on when and how those forces can fight, expanding the training and equipping of the Afghan National Army through a long-term partnership with NATO, and deploying more foreign police trainers. Address political deficiencies in judicial reform, reconstruction, governance, and anticorruption efforts.
• Continue to work with President Pervez Musharraf to dismantle Taliban and al Qaeda cells and camps in his country. Enhance Pakistan's ability to act against insurgent safe havens, bring children into schools and out of extremist madrasahs and support Pakistani moderates.
• Impose tougher political and economic sanctions to keep Iran from building nuclear weapons. If the United Nations is unwilling to act, the United States must lead a group of like-minded countries to impose effective multilateral sanctions. Support a disinvestment campaign. Military action, although not the preferred option, must remain on the table.
• Continue America's long-standing support for Israel by providing military equipment and technology and ensuring that Israel maintains its qualitative military edge.
• Intensify the commitment to the quest for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. But Hamas must be isolated.
• Employ every economic, diplomatic, political, legal, and ideological tool at our disposal to aid moderate Muslims -- women's rights campaigners, labor leaders, lawyers, journalists, teachers, tolerant imams, and many others -- who are resisting extremism.

Defending the Homeland
• Increase the size of the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps to 900,000 troops. Spend more on national defense. Accelerate the transformation of our military. Create an Army Advisory Corps with 20,000 soldiers to partner with militaries abroad. Increase the number of U.S. personnel available to engage in Special Forces operations, civil affairs activities, military policing, and military intelligence. Create a nonmilitary deployable police force to train foreign forces and help maintain law and order in places threatened by state collapse.
• Launch a crash program to prepare more experts in critical languages such as Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, and Pashto. Enlarge the military's Foreign Area Officer program and create a new specialty in strategic interrogation using advanced psychological techniques, rather than tactics prohibited by the Geneva Conventions.
• Set up a new agency patterned after the Office of Strategic Services which would draw together specialists in unconventional warfare, civil affairs, and psychological warfare; covert-action operators; and experts in anthropology, advertising, and other relevant disciplines from inside and outside government.
• Expand our postconflict reconstruction capabilities so that military campaigns would be complemented by civilian "surges" that would build the political and economic foundations of peace. Urge Congress to pass a civilian follow-on to the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act, which would create a framework for civil servants and military forces to train and work together in order to facilitate cooperation in postconflict reconstruction.
• Revitalize public diplomacy. Create a new independent agency like the U.S. Information Agency with the sole purpose of getting America's message to the world.

International Relations
• Link democratic nations in a worldwide League of Democracies. The organization could act when the UN fails -- to relieve human suffering in places such as Darfur, combat HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa, fashion better policies to confront environmental crises, provide unimpeded market access to those who endorse economic and political freedom, and take other measures unattainable by existing regional or universal-membership systems. This League of Democracies would not supplant the UN or other international organizations but complement them by harnessing the political and moral advantages offered by united democratic action.
• Seek the widest possible circle of allies through the League of Democracies, NATO, the UN, and the Organization of American States. Working multilaterally can be a frustrating experience, but approaching problems with allies works far better than facing problems alone.
• With the European Union, develop a common energy policy, create a transatlantic common market tying our economies more closely together, and institutionalize our cooperation on issues such as climate change, foreign assistance, and democracy promotion.
• The G-8 should include Brazil and India but exclude Russia. Western nations should make clear that the solidarity of NATO, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, is indivisible and that the organization's doors remain open to all democracies committed to the defense of freedom. Increase programs supporting freedom and the rule of law in Russia and emphasize that genuine partnership remains open to Moscow if it desires it but that such a partnership would involve a commitment to being a responsible actor, internationally and domestically.
• Revive the democratic solidarity that united the West during the Cold War. We cannot build an enduring peace based on freedom by ourselves. We must be willing to listen to our democratic allies. When we believe international action -- whether military, economic, or diplomatic -- is necessary, we must work to persuade our friends and allies that we are right. And we must also be willing to be persuaded by them. To be a good leader, America must be a good ally.
• Convene a summit of the world's leading powers with three agenda items. First, the notion that non-nuclear-weapons states have a right to nuclear technology must be revisited. Second, the burden of proof for suspected violators of the NPT must be reversed. Instead of requiring the International Atomic Energy Agency board to reach unanimous agreement in order to act, as is the case today, there should be an automatic suspension of nuclear assistance to states that the agency cannot guarantee are in full compliance with safeguard agreements. Finally, the IAEA's annual budget must be substantially increased so that the agency can meet its monitoring and safeguarding tasks.

Specific Countries
• Future talks with North Korea must take into account its ballistic missile programs, its abduction of Japanese citizens, and its support for terrorism and proliferation.
• Increase cooperation with our allies in Asia. Support Japan’s bid for permanent membership in the UN Security Council. Strengthen the US alliance with Australia. Rebuild our frayed partnership with South Korea by emphasizing economic and security cooperation. Cement our growing partnership with India.
• Seek an elevated partnership with Indonesia. Continue to expand defense cooperation with Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Vietnam. End Burma's human rights abuses. Participate more actively in Asian regional organizations.
• React when China proposes regional forums and economic arrangements designed to exclude America from Asia. Until China moves toward political liberalization, our relationship will be based on periodically shared interests rather than shared values.
• Complete free-trade agreements with Malaysia and Thailand, realize the full potential of our new trade agreement with South Korea, and institutionalize economic partnerships with India and Indonesia so that they build on existing agreements with Australia and Singapore.
• Enhance U.S. relations with Mexico to control illegal immigration drug trafficking, and with Brazil. Give these and other democratic Latin American nations a voice in the League of Democracies.
• Counter the propaganda of demagogues who threaten the security and prosperity of the Americas. Marginalize Hugo Chávez. Prepare for Cuba's transition to democracy by developing a plan with regional and European partners for a post-Castro Cuba. Ratify pending trade agreements with Colombia, Panama, and Peru and complete a Free Trade Area of the Americas.
• Engage on a political, economic, and security level with friendly governments across Africa. Establish the goal of eradicating malaria on the continent.
• Consider the use of all elements of American power to stop the outrageous acts of human destruction that have unfolded in Darfur.

Energy, Environment and Globalization
• Employ technology to achieve new efficiencies in energy extraction and consumption, enforce conservation, create market incentives to encourage the development of alternative sources of energy and hybrid vehicles, and expand sources of renewable energy. Greatly increase the use of nuclear power.
• Set reasonable caps on emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases and provide industries with tradable emissions credits.
• Reform job training and education programs to more effectively help displaced American workers find new jobs. Continue to promote free trade. Aggressively promote global trade liberalization at the World Trade Organization and expand America's free-trade agreements to friendly nations.

Comments

[James]

I could spend all day deconstructing McCain's views but, in short, his foreign policy prescriptions are based on the notion of a shared global political culture that doesn't exist. McCain appears to be one of those guys who assumes that inside of every foreigner is a darling little American just waiting to come out. Thus he assumes his "League of Democracies" will automatically endorse every American whim. But our experience with Europe indicates otherwise...

His call for the "leading powers" to change the NPT without troubling themselves to consult the insignificant little nations that make up the majority nicely encapsulate his true vision of democracy. There is nothing that indicates his understanding that the "leading powers'" possession of nuclear weapons and repeated threats to use them might be driving proliferation far more than the IAEA's incompetence, which is more imagined than real. I predict once the "leading powers" put their finishing touches on their plan to create energy dependencies out of the rest of the world the NPT will be dead once and for all. "Reversing the burden of proof for suspected violators" is nonsensical. Any college kid knows it's basically impossible to prove a negative; one politically motivated blackball based on "secret intelligence" could shut down an entire industry.

I like his list of moderate Muslims he admires: teachers, labor leaders, women's rights advocates. These are just the sort of dissidents he would have labelled as expendable "Communist sympathizers" back in the day. Tell me, can he spare a warm thought for the thousands of union organizers and Indian rights' advocates assassinated by death squads in Colombia over the last twenty years? What about the five labor leaders killed last week in Guatemala?

So it's all mush, but I've said that about all the candidates so far. The simple fact is that they have few new ideas beyond tweaking the means by which we pursue our general policy of global hegemony, without seriously questioning whether the policy is viable or worth what it costs us. Even the call for more "international cooperation" is really a proposal to twist arms and get others to buy into our initiatives without compromising them. But to get along you have to go along. The US will not be able to enlist the support of other nations until it lends its support to their concerns.

The NPT remains the perfect example: the debate is always framed as the "good guys," meaning the ones that have nuclear weapons, having to police the "bad guys," meaning the ones that DON'T have them. The idea that the non-nuclear states might reverse that logic, seeing the nuclear-armed states as more threatening than the non-nuclear states, never seems to penetrate the mind of people like McCain. If nuclear weapons are a primary security concern for the US, why shouldn't Third World countries demand a quid pro quo with regards to their security? But the foreign policy of American politicians seems to regard such genuine compromise as beneath the dignity of a great nation, and that is why all their proposals will go nowhere.

[Nikol]

Consider this, too http://www.samsonblinded.org/news/muslim-world/pakistan