JULES EVANS, LONDON
WHAT WOULD A MCCAIN PRESIDENCY MEAN FOR RUSSIA?
President Putin must be watching the US presidential elections with some mild concern. Because the person who is emerging as the favourite for the US presidency – John McCain – is also one of Putin’s most outspoken critics among the US political elite.
McCain now looks set to win the Republican Party’s nomination, which means he will run against either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama from the Democratic Party in the presidential election in 2008. And polls suggest, at the moment, that he would beat either of them.
And this is what McCain, in a 2007 article, said his foreign policy would be towards Russia if he was president: “Today we see in Russia diminishing political freedoms, a leadership dominated by a clique of former intelligence officers, efforts to bully democratic neighbours, such as Georgia, and attempts to manipulate Europe’s dependency on Russian oil and gas. We need a new Western approach to this revanchist Russia.”
McCain shares none of Bush junior’s fondness for the man Bush calls Pooty-Poot. While Bush famously said he looked into Putin’s soul and liked what he saw, McCain says: “I looked into Putin’s soul and saw three letters: K, G and B.”
He said on another occasion: “Mysterious assassinations are even taking place. If oil were still $10 a barrel, Mr. Putin would not pose any kind of a threat. I do not believe you will see a reigniting of the Cold War. But I do believe that Putin and his cadre of KGB friends are causing us great difficulties in a variety of ways, including a failure to assist us in trying to rein in Iranian nuclear ambitions.”
So what exactly would McCain do? He says he would be “very harsh” with Russia, and suggests starting by excluding it from the G8, but including Brazil and India.
We would also likely see continued strong support from the US for Ukraine and Georgia. McCain is a vocal supporter of including Ukraine into NATO and the EU, so it can act as a buffer against Russian expansionism. He wrote in 2004: “we risk Ukraine slipping further into the Russian orbit…As Zbigniew Brzezinski wisely remarked, with Ukraine subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire.”
Of course, previous presidential candidates have talked tough on Russia on their campaigns – like Bush junior, for example – only to turn sweet once in power, simply because their problems in the Middle East meant facing off with Russia was not a priority. Successive US governments have needed Russia’s help – in the UN Security Council with their moves against Iraq and now Iran, and in the war against the Taliban in Central Asia.
And these issues have been more important than confronting the Kremlin in the name of Russian liberalism, which most Russians don’t care much about anyway.
However, we cannot rule out that McCain would prove a more hard-line president when it comes to the former Soviet Union than his three predecessors. This, after all, is a man whose plane was shot down by a Soviet anti-aircraft missile in Vietnam, and who as a consequence spent five years being held captive and repeatedly tortured as a result.
McCain is easily the most hawkish of the three presidential possibilities (the other two being Obama and Clinton). Obama never supported the war in Iraq, and says he would be prepared to negotiate with the leaders of ‘rogue nations’. Clinton, like her husband, doesn’t really care about foreign policy as long as it wins her votes at home. She will bomb if it is politically expedient.
But McCain cares. He comes from a services background, spent 22 years in the Navy, and both his father and grandfather were admirals of the fleet. And he is not one to back away from confrontation.
He immediately supported the war against Saddam Hussein, and unlike his rivals, he still supports it, and says the US needs more troops and better funding for the war, despite this being very unpopular. He said: “I’d much rather lose a campaign than a war”.
When asked how the US should treat Iran, McCain recently sung, to the tune of the Beach Boys’Barbara Ann: “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran”. He said he was joking afterwards.
At the same time, Russians reading this shouldn’t get the impression McCain is just another neo-con crazy, like Dick Cheney. He’s much more of a nuanced political figure than Cheney. McCain, for example, led an amendment saying the US would not use torture techniques against detainees in Gauntanamo Bay or anywhere else. He is no friend of the Christian Right, calling one of its most prominent campaigners “a self-serving son-of-a-bitch”. He frightens big business too, having led a huge reform against campaign finance that, if it didn’t curtail the influence of big business over the American political process, certainly made it more transparent.
If McCain did become president, and the Medvedev regime was looking for a way to approach him, the best way might be through one of his senior advisors, Rick Davis, who is McCain’s campaign advisor.
Davis has quite deep links to Russia through the lobbying firm he set up, Davis Manafort, which has a number of Russian and Ukrainian clients.
Davis’s former partner Paul Manafort was also, interestingly, a public relations consultant for both Viktor Yanukovych and the metals oligarch Rinat Akhmetov in Ukraine. He helped organize Yanukovych’s 2006 trip to Washington, which was considered a PR success.
While McCain’s aggressive foreign policy tone might be worrying the Kremlin, we have to remind ourselves that whoever becomes the next US president will inherit an economy that, my banker friends tell me, is in the worst shape it's been in since 1929.
That means that theoretically, the US will mainly be focusing on re-building its economy over the next five to ten years, as it did in the isolationist 1930s. So the US is going to become less and less of an economic magnet in the next decade, and perhaps less of a presence in international politics. The Kremlin might well be saying, ‘the next US president? Who cares?’
Jules Evans, a columnist of Eurasian Home website, London
February 7, 2008
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