His age is showing and not in a good way. McCain is nostalgic for the Cold War, when Russia was an enemy the U.S. loved to hate.
Politico: Obama, Bush and others made their shifts in tone as the brutal, disproportional nature of Russia’s response began to become clear. But McCain’s confrontational stance on the Caucasus crisis stems from a long, personal skepticism of Russian intentions, one that dates back to the Cold War and which eased only briefly in the early 1990s.
Indeed, McCain, who publicly confronted Putin in Munich last year, may be the most visible — and now potentially influential — American antagonist of Russia. What remains to be seen is whether the endgame to the Georgia crisis makes McCain seem prophetic or headstrong and whether his muscular rhetoric plays a role in defining for voters the kind of commander in chief he would be.
What is not in doubt is McCain’s view of Russia. His belief that Moscow harbors dangerous aspirations goes back a long way, as does his fervent view that the only way to quiet the Russian bear is through tough talk and threat of real consequences — and certainly not through accommodation.
McCain has suggested he sees Russia’s danger to its neighbors through a long historical lens. As far back as 1996, when Russia was near economic ruin and governed by an erratic Boris Yeltsin, he warned of the danger of “Russian nostalgia for empire.”
That belief has not changed. “I think it’s very clear that Russian ambitions are to restore the old Russian empire," McCain told local reporters on his bus in Pennsylvania on Monday. "Not the Soviet Union, but the Russian empire."
Even if he is right and Russia has sinister ambitions, McCain shouldn't be poking and prodding because it makes the situation worse. It's Bush all over. Axis of evil.
“This is a guy who grew up in the Cold War, was a military person and an honorable man, but has not changed his ways of thinking about Russia,” said Jonathan Elkind, a Democrat who served on President Bill Clinton’s National Security Council. The U.S. should be “explaining with precision what we don't like about their behavior, rather than saying he ‘looked into Putin’s eyes and saw KGB.’ That has an adolescent quality that gets us exactly nowhere.”
"Speaking directly to the Russians as opposed to in some pugnacious Cold War-fashion is what this modern challenge needs," said Mark Brzezinski, an informal foreign policy adviser to the Obama campaign. "What Russia needs to know is that it will be globally ostracized — and Barack Obama's global approach is different from the state-to-state balance of power approach that is visible in the McCain talking points."
McCain is not alone, pundits are out in force talking about the conflict.
Here's a sampling:
Russia on the march
Russia was right
Russia heading for a fall
The great game
