What McCain is Reading These Days--and Why it Matters

 
Spotted by NEWSWEEK's own Holly Bailey in John McCain's seat on board his campaign plane Thursday afternoon: "The Return of History and the End of Dreams" by Robert Kagan, neoconservative thinker and informal McCain adviser. 

In case you're curious, Kagan is "a hate figure for large sections of the left... [who] has been blamed for many things, prominent among them being one of the intellectual authors and cheerleaders for the US-led war in Iraq." His slim volume is essentially an extended essay on how "autocracy is making a comeback" and how "the new era, rather than being a time of 'universal values,' will be one of growing tensions and sometimes confrontation between the forces of democracy and the forces of autocracy." Here's how New York Times chief Washington correspondent David E. Sanger summarized Kagan's argument in his recent review: "The cold war may be over, but anyone who thinks the result was really 'the end of history' — a consensus that liberal democracy is the future — should take another look." Like his fellow neocons, Kagan boasts "an untrammeled faith in democracy as an engine of peace," so his prescription for dealing with resurgent autocracies in "a world where the United Nations Security Council is 'hopelessly paralyzed' and NATO is happiest parachuting into territory where there is little chance of hearing gunfire," as Sanger puts it, is a something called a "league of democracies."

If you've been following the campaign at all, this should sound familiar. On March 26, McCain gave a speech on in Los Angeles that was billed as his most comprehensive statement on the subject. The centerpiece? A league of democracies. In his address, McCain proposed that the United States expel Russia and exclude China from the , the group of advanced industrial countries, and take in both India and Brazil, creating a group that would, in the words of my NEWSWEEK colleague Fareed Zakaria, "presumably play the role that the United Nations now does, except that all nondemocracies would be cast outside the pale." Fareed, for one, is not a fan. Calling the McCain/Kagan proposal "the most radical idea put forward by a major candidate for the presidency in 25 years," he questioned how the League of Democracies would fight terrorism while excluding countries like Jordan, Morocco, Egypt and Singapore; secure loose nukes without Russia's cooperation; and coordinate problems of the emerging global economy by putting China on the sidelines.

Maybe you disagree. That's fine. The point is, Kagan is "one of the few foreign policy intellectuals that [McCain] seems to respect." So much so, in fact, that the senator now seems to be rereading "The Return of History." (Judging by his effusive blurb on the book's back flap--"important, timely, superbly-written"--he has already read it at least once.) As the political press spends its newsless summer obsessing over cartoons and "nuts" and Obama's excessive exercising, it'd probably benefit every serious voter--that is, every voter serious enough to wonder how a President McCain would alter American foreign policy--to crack its cover as well.