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Judah Grunstein
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31 Mar 2008
I thought I'd toss this Daily Standard piece by Joseph Loconte on McCain's foreign policy address into the mix. He seems to come down somewhere between Hampton and myself
on what McCain offers: a little uneasy about the idealist hurdles a
League of Democracies will present to a realist agenda, but ultimately
reassured by being more sympathetic to McCain than I probably am.
I'd
add that should McCain become president, America will undoubtedly be
tied down in Iraq for the foreseeable future, meaning that whatever
potential dangers for military adventurism his democracy agenda
presented would be moot.
As for the democracy agenda itself, I'm trying to get my hands on a copy of the report mentioned in this press release.
It's an economic analysis which concludes that political liberty, and
not poverty, is the key corollary for terrorism. Significantly, it's
neither highly repressive nor highly democratic states, but those in
the middle band that are most likely to breed terrorism. That suggests
that McCain's freedom agenda doesn't well serve the centrality of the
terrorist threat to his national security vision, since the highly
repressive states it would most likely target are not the highest
terrorist risks. I'll post more when I get a copy of the report, but it
seemed worth mentioning.
A final thought is that in retrospect I
might have placed too much emphasis on McCain's democracy promotion in
my critique of his speech. It's there, and especially prominent in his
definition of success in Iraq. But it's really his suggestion that we
create a privileged multi-lateral League of Democracies (to replace
existing mutli-lateral institutions? Loconte notes that the UN isn't
mentioned once in the speech) that is the biggest policy innovation.
Nikolas Gvosdev, like Loconte, wonders how realistic it is
to assume that democratic values will trump strategic interests in
international relations. I wonder whether it's the right tone to strike
to re-varnish our post-Bush global image.