John McCain along with Democrat leaders greeting the new King Salman of Saudi Arabia at the Erqa Royal Palace in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on January 27, 2015. [State Department photo/ Public Domain
Now Senator McCain has taken a major swipe at President Trump’s nationalist focus. In a recent speech McCain attacked Trump’s America first philosophy, saying “To fear the world we have organized and led for three quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain ‘the last best hope of earth’ for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history.” The neocon-led establishment media has taken these words and used them as a cudgel against the President.
Andrew Bracevich is a critic of McCain’s, and is no great fan of Donald Trump either. At The American Conservative, Bracevich points out the flaws in both mens’ philosophies and asks, is there no third way?
Yet strip away the rhetoric and what we have are dueling forms of ignorance, with each party imprisoned by his own illusions. Trump thinks that having run the Trump Organization he can run the world. McCain thinks that running the world is what God or Providence summons the mystical enterprise known as America to do.
That pretty much describes the present-day debate over basic national security policy: It’s egomania pitted against platitudes, individual vainglory versus vainglory on a national scale. Neither side has much regard for evidence.
Trump blasphemes. McCain hews to the Old Time Religion. Is there no third way?
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