McCain's Multilateralism

Ilan Goldenberg and Max Bergmann take a closer look at John McCain's alleged desire to break with Bush on the subject of alliances and multilateralism and finds that there's no real there there.

Comments

That's because he keeps trying to get countries to join the League of Nations, unaware that isolationists in the United States will doom his efforts and help to insure the Second World War...

Posted by Matt | May 9, 2008 1:33 PM

This trope from Matt is just stupid. With respect to Iraq, we got the nations we have always been able to rely on - the UK and Australia - to join us. In Afghanistan, NATO is supposedly helping, and it's supposedly a NATO mission. Due to the utter lack of military capability of most of NATO, we aren't getting any real help.

With Iran - we approached that through the UN and through multiple partners, including Russia and China. What more do you expect? Obama's - and the left's - odd call in Iran is for more unilateral action - unconditional negotiations. What we could offer Iran that they would find to be of value is left unstated, since there's no there, there.

North Korea - same story. We've only done multi-lateral talks, and the left's complaint is - again - that we should go more unilateral and meet NK one on one (never mind the South Korean's who have the most to lose or gain from any result).

When you guys figure out what you actually want (other than "whatever this administration isn't doing"), let the rest of us know.

Posted by James Robertson | May 9, 2008 3:16 PM