John McCain and Russia

[Joanne98]

The latest campaign twister from John McCain is that he is not questioning Barack Obama's patriotism, only his judgment. But what kind of judgment has McCain been exercising the past several months by calling for the ouster of Russia from the G-8, the group of economic powers that is essential to global stability? Not only is he echoing the language of the Cold War hawks who want to exclude Russia from the World Trade Organization and to abolish the NATO-Russia Council, he wants to re-examine the entire range of U.S.-Russian relations. Conciliation does not seem to be a word in McCain's vocabulary.

These, Mikhail Gorbachev wrote in the New York Times this week, "are empty threats." The former president of the Soviet Union said, "for some time now, Russians have been wondering: If our opinion counts for nothing in those institutions, do we really need them? Just to sit at the nicely set dinner table and listen to lectures?"

If the original intent of the post Cold War era was to bring the former Communist superpower into the family of nations, then was it the war in Georgia that truly turned around George Bush? How could he have been so mistaken after his first meeting with the Russian leader when he declared that "I looked the man in the eye. I was able to get a sense of his soul. I knew that President Putin was a man with whom I could work?"

McCain did not jump to any such conclusions. He rendered a hard line proposal, first in last November's issue of Foreign Affairs and again on March 26 in a speech before the Los Angeles World Affairs Council. He was all for expelling the Russians from previously agreed upon understandings. In retrospect, given what has transpired in the past two weeks in Georgia, you would have thought that the serious candidate for president might have been exceedingly cautious when he discussed the delicate nature of U.S. relations with Russia. But not so.

As David Remnick wrote in the August 25th issue of the New Yorker, Putin is nowhere near as naïve. "Putin," he said, is demonstrating that he is willing to use force; that he is unwilling to let Georgia and the Ukraine enter NATO without exacting a severe price; and that he views the United States as hypocritical, overextended, distracted and reluctant to make good on its protective assurances to the likes of Georgia."

The New Yorker editor in chief was a Moscow correspondent for the Washington Post at the end of the Cold War and since then has written several thoughtful essays about Putin's Russia. In his latest article, he describes some of the neo-Conservatives' comparisons between the events in Georgia and the past in the Europe of the 1930s, or the Soviet invasions of Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968 as "cartoonish rhetoric."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/murray-fromson/john-mccain-and-russia_b_120687.html