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The Daily Dish - 2006-2011 archives for The Daily Dish, featuring Andrew Sullivan

McCain And The Neocons

By The Daily Dish
Jan 30 2008, 3:02 AM ET

Bainbridge worries about the senator's statist and interventionist rhetoric:

McCain has a lot more in common with TR and Bill Kristol than Ronald Reagan. And that’s damned scary. Why? If the Bush era has taught us nothing else, it is that we must be skeptical of interventionist foreign policies whether grounded in the national greatness “conservatism” of a Teddy Roosevelt or the neo-"conservatism" of a Bill Kristol. It produced a foreign policy quagmire that eviscerated any opportunity to advance the conservative agenda at home, as I’ve complained in more detail elsewhere. Importantly when it comes to McCain, his interventionism is fundamentally contrary to the traditions of mainstream conservatism. We can complain about various McCain positions, like McCain-Feingold, but in a sense those are tactical issues. Here is where, in my opinion, McCain fundamentally goes off the reservation. After all, as Russell Kirk wrote:

Are we to saturation-bomb most of Africa and Asia into righteousness, freedom, and democracy? And, having accomplished that, however would we ensure persons yet more unrighteous might not rise up instead of the ogres we had swept away? ... In short, deliberate entry into war commonly brings on consequences disagreeable even to the seeming victors. Prudent statesmen long have known that armed conflict, for all involved, ought to be the last desperate resort, to be entered upon only when all means of diplomacy, conciliation, and compromise have been exhausted.

Query whether Teddy Roosevelt or Bill Kristol would ascribe to those principles?



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