McCain vs. The World

It seems that McCain and his foreign policy team have taken a very Cold War-era approach to the rest of the world. In simple math, it goes something like this... Georgia=good, Russia=Bad. According to McCain's chief foreign policy guy, Randy Scheunemann, Russia and China are not our allies and pose serious threats the the United States and democracy in general.

I like the way Ezra responds to this madness:

One thing worth keeping in mind about great power conflicts is that they're rarely inevitable. At times, France and England have been at war, and at times they've been allies. A lot of it has to do with how leaders interact with each other, and whether they aggressively court conflict or publicly seek a constructive relationship. If you court conflict, soon enough, the other country does, and both sides build up a narrative of slights and provocations -- many of them quite real -- that lead to war and discord. But it is a choice: You can decide whether you want a relationship defined by transgressions and stare-downs, or whether you want a relationship where the overriding narrative is of alliance and both sides work to play down points of disagreement. Scheunemann, here, is courting conflict, and as McCain's chief foreign policy adviser, that's a pretty good indicator for how a McCain administration would look.

One of McCain's ideas - a league of democracies - is supposed to counter the perceived threat of a Russian or Chinese veto in the United Nations Security Council. While I think there are critical issues where a Chinese veto stymies progress (eg. Burma), the Security Council does a great deal to serve the interests of the United States.

Yglesias puts it well:

The UN Security Council mechanism by design prevents any country from taking action that is deemed contrary to the vital interests of the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Russia, or France. This causes some very real problems. It’s important to note, however, that it’s a completely two way street and, historically, the U.S. does more vetoing than any other country. I think it would make a lot of sense for the United States to propose shifting the Security Council from a unanimity rule to some kind of qualified majority rule. But what Scheunemann seems to be contemplating (a world in which the US does get to protect its vital interests, but Russia and China don’t) is going to be a non-starter in Moscow and Beijing for obvious reasons.

And at the end of the day, each country is going to do what it is going to do:

If the U.S. were to try to invade Burma in the face of Russian and Chinese opposition, in the context of new great power tensions, you’d just wind up with a bloody proxy conflict not with vast new humanitarian benefits. The problem, at the end of the day, is with the underlying pattern of facts — SLORC is terrible, Burma is close to China, China sees defending Burma’s sovereignty as important, and China is a big and important country these days. Given those facts, there’s no great procedural fix no matter what you do with the UN Security Council. But the Security Council mechanism, as currently operating, has a lot of value in other domains that would be lost if we cast it aside in pursuit of a fantasy that doing so would somehow allow us to completely brush off opposition of other major countries to certain proposed military adventures.