McCain, the American Right and the future of US foreign policy

Two months have passed since the death of Republican Senator John McCain, and still, it is hard for me not to loop back to an incident I experienced 2 years ago in Arizona, the senator’s home state.

Shortly before the US election while driving along I noticed a McCain campaign poster, graffiti-tagged with the slogan, “Globalist Trader.” I quickly concluded that the culprit had misspelled the latter word and meant to write “traitor”. The spelling error was amusing and predictable all at once, but what shocked me most instead was the assertion’s baselessness. That is, the fact that someone had the audacity to brand the senator a traitor, when McCain had spent five and half years in a North Vietnamese POW camp in the service of his country. Back then, the whole poster defacing episode left me with a palpable sense of foreboding that reached its full denouement on election night.

Now, only last month at the UN in his brazen attack against the liberal international order, President Donald Trump bashes what he derisively calls “globalism.” Since Trump’s election, many on the US Right have come to regard the liberal international order as some sort of foreign contagion, despite it originating from America’s post-war ascendancy which McCain as both soldier and senator dedicated his life to. As McCain noted in his final testament before his death, America had “not been an island” but had been “involved in mankind” and so it was. The United States during McCain’s lifetime, led a coalition of allies in the fight against both fascism and communism, embodying both idealism and realism, the balance between principle and power, in which being the guarantor of a multilateral based liberal world order also “assumed American leadership.”

There is not enough space here to numerate every reason why Trump wants to ransack this uniquely American inheritance. But one explanation that stands above others speaks to his own experience as a CEO more than statesman. The multilateral driven set-up mentioned above hems in the President not from being the dealmaker he pretends to be, but the unilateralist that he truly is. So Trump ad nauseum bellows “America First”, a bit similar to what 19th Century British Foreign Secretary, George Canning, once quipped, “Nations for themselves, God for all”. But the latter courtesy that Canning offered, would be considered an extravagance to Trump who sees the world solely as a zero-sum game.

Now, only a handful of “McCainiac” Republicans remain on Capitol Hill. McCain’s former righthand man in the Senate, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, for example, carefully balances his criticism of the President, while still seeking to court his favor. Graham’s theatrical defense of Brett Kavanaugh at last month’s Supreme Court hearings drama, left the impression that now with McCain’s passing, he intends to audition for a seat in Trump’s cabinet. Overall, Republicans who once openly promoted McCain’s views, now think twice, wishing not to offend their own local constituencies.

Which brings us to the heart of the issue. Part of Trump’s astonishing electoral appeal, they now realize, was his wholesale rejection of anything smacking of internationalism, from mentions of the UN, NATO, World Bank, and broader the universal Human Rights agenda. All sinews of influence that ironically have been crucial to holding together American hegemony. Regardless, judging the extent to which Trump’s critique of globalism resonates with the grass roots of the Republican Party, I can’t help but go back to that hot summer day in Scottsdale Arizona, seeing John McCain’s vandalized campaign poster.

For those Republicans still willing to carry McCain’s torch without compromise, they make up a small rump within the party, now colloquially termed “Never Trumpers.” Since the election, their morale and influence on the American Right’s future may be at an all- time low. One of the leading lights of the “Never Trumpers”, strategist and policy commentator, Robert Kagan, in a recent influential op-ed piece in the New York Times, has already conceded defeat. He claims that “American First has won” and warns the rest of the world, that it is likely here to stay.

Where McCain’s robust foreign policy views will find a home in the future is unclear, but its transference to the Democratic Party is doubtful. With leftwing senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren being party nominee frontrunners for 2020, along with socialist candidates making political headway in recent state elections, McCain’s consistent call for greater US interventionism in world affairs is met with open skepticism. Democrats of the John F. Kennedy persuasion, those prepared to “bear any burden, pay any price” so that America in the former President’s words, would continue to be the world’s “keystone in the arch of freedom” are now few and far between. Precisely because that same “liberal” global system was to them essentially an American creation. Structured to preserve national privilege, rather than promote true international cooperation. In other words, a stealth-like stand-in for American Empire. Moreover, what has come to define our understanding of US foreign policy as John McCain understood it, is that America is the “indispensable nation” of the world. An indication of national hubris that runs counter to the perspective of many Democrats who steer towards humility, or worse, self-flagellation.

Where McCain’s legacy stands to become most firmly established for the long haul, is not within the minds of American voters, but with those who are part of the national security establishment, who Trump ominously refers to as the “Deep State.” If the country continues to follow Trump’s lead, retreating back to “Fortress America”, the institutional machinery of a superpower like the US, does not change overnight to reflect the will of the people so quickly. Already we see, as Bob Woodward outlined in Fear, the diplomatic network of the United States, much of its military brass and intelligence agencies are fighting the President, tooth and nail, over his isolationist, unilateralist urges. This ostensibly means John McCain, in his well-documented rivalry with the President, may in the end enjoy the last laugh. McCain’s outlook, not Trump’s, will extend into the foreseeable future. What this disconnect between the state and its citizenry means for the health of American democracy, however, is an altogether different question.

This DIIS Comment was originally published in Danish in Jyllands-Posten, 15 October 2018.