My guess is that I'll get a bunch of comments calling Senator McCain a RINO and a few other things.
Frankly, I've never bought into all of these attacks on Senator McCain. He is a war hero and extremely realistic about our foreign policy.
Today, Senator McCain showed again why he was the better man to lead the US back in 2008, or at the peak of "hope and change," "Obamamania" and silly people who just wanted to believe that everything was Bush's fault.
Senator McCain dissected President Obama's foreign policy brilliantly in an op-ed piece Friday's New York Times:
"For five years, Americans have been told that “the tide of war is receding,” that we can pull back from the world at little cost to our interests and values. This has fed a perception that the United States is weak, and to people like Mr. Putin, weakness is provocative. That is how Mr. Putin viewed the “reset” policy. United States missile defense plans were scaled back. Allies in Eastern Europe and Georgia were undercut. NATO enlargement was tabled. A new strategic arms reduction treaty required significant cuts by America, but not Russia. Mr. Putin gave little. M. Obama promised “more flexibility.”
Mr. Putin also saw a lack of resolve in President Obama’s actions beyond Europe. In Afghanistan and Iraq, military decisions have appeared driven more by a desire to withdraw than to succeed. Defense budgets have been slashed based on hope, not strategy. Iran and China have bullied America’s allies at no discernible cost. Perhaps worst of all, Bashar al-Assad crossed President Obama’s “red line” by using chemical weapons in Syria, and nothing happened to him.
For Mr. Putin, vacillation invites aggression. His world is a brutish, cynical place, where power is worshiped, weakness is despised, and all rivalries are zero-sum. He sees the fall of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” He does not accept that Russia’s neighbors, least of all Ukraine, are independent countries. To him, they are Russia’s “near abroad” and must be brought back under Moscow’s dominion by any means necessary.
What is most troubling about Mr. Putin’s aggression in Crimea is that it reflects a growing disregard for America’s credibility in the world. That has emboldened other aggressive actors — from Chinese nationalists to Al Qaeda terrorists and Iranian theocrats."
It does not get better than that. We've been projecting weakness by looking to retreat rather than succeed. We announced a surge in Afghanistan and then told the bad guys when we are leaving. Over in Iraq, we did not fight for an agreement to keep troops. We drew a red line in Syria and then erased. Today, we look confused over the Ukraine invasion.
The whole world is watching and they are seeing how things look like when the US is weak and unwilling to act like a superpower.
Great op-ed piece by Senator McCain. Too bad that he didn't win.
More Politics Podcasts at Blog Talk Radio with Silvio Canto Jr on BlogTalkRadio
Tags: SEnator McCain To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the My View by Silvio Canto, Jr. Thanks!