John McCain and The Crisis in Georgia

Frank Lyon

Russia’s deplorable actions in Georgia this week provide us with an ideal opportunity to scrutinize presidential leadership. Despite his belated condemnation of Russia’s invasion, President Bush has obviously been more interested in his Olympic visit, where he was seen relaxing and joking around with American athletes while the crisis unfolded. His lame duck status makes his muted reaction to Putin’s (and Medvedev’s) strong arm tactics understandable, though not less excusable.

Since our current president seems to have abdicated the leadership role on the issue, Americans have a chance to see how the contenders for his job might handle it. Conventional wisdom suggests that this crisis will favor John McCain, with his superior experience that comes largely as a result of his age and longevity in the Senate. He should be hitting this one straight out of the park, but if his performance over the last two days is any indication of how he might manage this and future crises, he hasn’t done himself any favors.

CNN this morning (I’m sorry I can’t say on which program – I was watching at the gym and flipping channels) reported primarily on McCain’s inability to pronounce the name of Georgian president Saakashvili, showing back to back to back clips of the Senator mangling the Georgian’s name over the course of a short statement. If the world leader in cable news is trying to give Jon Stewart a run for his money, they are doing a good job, but this is hardly a valid criticism of McCain’s leadership on this complex issue. In an effort to be fair,  CNN also quoted Barack Obama’s response to the Russian incursion, noting that while Obama’s first response was tepid, he seems to have ratcheted up his criticism as the crisis has worn on. There was no footage or reporting on Obama’s pronunciation.

Lost in the serious questioning of whether or not McCain will be able to speak to foreign leaders even if he can’t speak about them is the question of what he might actually do. Here CNN was, probably unintentionally, informative when they broadcast a clip of McCain calling for a UN Security Council Resolution condemning Russia’s actions in Georgia. On its face this sounds like a sensible idea, one which steals Obama’s thunder in building bridges with U.S. allies and approaches foreign policy more multilaterally than the Bush administration has. The problem, however, is with McCain’s proposal itself. It is highly unlikely that the Security Council will ever vote to censure Russia because Russia is one of its permanent five members and holds a veto over any proposed Council actions. Russia, therefore, would be able to block any UNSC measure of censure against itself. If McCain wants to be taken seriously as a master of international affairs, he should know this.

There are a number of possible explanations for  this boneheaded policy suggestion. The most charitable is that McCain simply mis-spoke; he meant to say a UN General Assembly resolution censuring Russia, although GA resolutions certainly have less bite than those coming out of the Security Council. More cynically, McCain could have offered up his policy proscription believing, probably correctly, that most Americans either don’t know how the UN works, don’t care, or don’t trust the organization anyway. The most troubling scenario would be that McCain himself doesn’t really understand how the UN works and its role in international diplomacy. If this is the case, he is closer to the Bush administration in terms of international relations than he would probably like us to believe. Regardless of your opinion of the current administration’s internationalism, it is not too much for us to ask that a candidate President show a little care and nuance when discussing actions to be taken that might confront the world’s second most powerful nuclear arsenal. Especially if he is holding himself out as the expert on world affairs.