August 12, 2008
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John McCain's assessment stands up much better: When he looked at Putin, "he saw three letters: a K, a G, and a B." Putin's neo-Soviet state has launched a nakedly illegal invasion of neighboring Georgia that is reminiscent of the Winter War against Finland at the outset of World War II. The Russian press is pumping out absurd lies about Georgian acts of genocide, even as the Russian military indiscriminately bombs and shells Georgian cities. Edward Gibbon's description of the Inquisition comes to mind -- nonsense defended by cruelty.
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McCain's proposal from a few months ago to boot Russia from the G-8 has gone from seeming needlessly provocative to practically prescient. Together with the surge in Iraq, the Georgian crisis is the second strategic matter on which everyone else has followed the senator's lead.
McCain warned of Russian designs on its
"near-abroad" when Boris Yeltsin was still in power, and advocated the enlargement of NATO into Eastern Europe -- as a way to cement those countries into the West and check Russian adventurism -- years before the Clinton administration adopted it as policy.
McCain's judgment benefits from years of marinating in national-security issues and traveling and getting to know the key players; from a hatred of tinpot dictators and bloody thugs that guides his moral compass; and from a flinty realism (verging at times on fatalism) that is resistant to illusions about personalities, or the inevitable direction of History, or the nature of the world.
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