McCain Refuses To Attack Obama's Foreign Policy

Team Infidel

Forum Spin Doctor
Financial Times
March 21, 2009
By Edward Luce and Demetri Sevastopulo
It was almost as if last autumn’s bitterly fought presidential election never happened. En route to Brussels, where he will give a keynote speech on Saturday at a security conference, John McCain sounds supportive of the man who defeated him.
Asked whether Barack Obama will return next month empty-handed from Strasbourg, where he will request more support from his Nato counterparts in Afghanistan, Mr McCain said: “There is enormous goodwill in Europe towards the new president.”
In an interview with the Financial Times, Mr McCain, who retained his Senate seat when he became his party’s nominee, repeatedly declined to criticise Mr Obama’s foreign policy stances, including the decision to explore the possibilities of talks with Iran. “I’m not against a dialogue with the Iranians,” he said. “What I was opposed to in the campaign was a one-to-one dialogue with characters dedicated to the extermination of Israel [Mahmoud Ahmedi-Nejad, Iran’s president].”
Mr McCain was equally emollient on Mr Obama’s soft-pedalling approach to Russia, in spite of bouts of near cold-war rhetoric during the campaign (“We are all Georgians now”).
This month Hillary Clinton gave Sergei Lavrov, her Russian counterpart, a box that said “reset” in English on one side and “self-destruct”, instead of “reset”, in Russian on the other side in a slip-up that caused some embarrassment.
“If I gave him a reset button, I’d find someone in the state department who understands Russian,” said Mr McCain. But he added: “I’d reiterate that we want to engage in dialogue with Russia . . . We are not going to see a reignition of the cold war. Russia doesn’t have the military or economic clout to do that.”
In less than two weeks Mr Obama will meet Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, and Hu Jintao, China’s president, for separate bilateral meetings on the fringes of the G20 summit in London. Mr McCain said China and Russia were flexing their muscles round the world.
But he suggested that while there were points of friction, neither wanted confrontation with the US. “In both cases, it is clearly in their interests to co-operate in certain areas and there are other manifestations of age-old anger or muscle flexing . . . that we have to handle with sensitivity.”
Speaking as Mr Obama finalises a new Afghanistan policy, the Arizona senator who supports a stronger US troop commitment, said there was a debate within the administration on whether to take a “minimalist” app­roach or to launch a more comprehensive counter-insurgency effort.
Mr McCain urged his one-time rival to provide the American people with straight talk on the difficult nature of the conflict. “The president should not wait a day without saying ‘this is going to be tough’. A year from now as we move in to southern Afghanistan, casualties are going to be higher, and the anti-war sentiment will grow.”
 
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