In the warmonger sweepstakes now taking place among the major GOP presidential contenders, John McCain out-demagogued even Rudy Giuliani, whose studied belligerence seems narrowly centered on the Middle East. McCain’s enmity is universal: if he were president, in addition to taking on the Arabs and the Persians, we’d soon be at loggerheads with the Russians.  

The G-8, he says, should be “a club of leading market democracies: It should include Brazil and India but exclude Russia.” Putin’s Russia, he claims, is “revanchist” and surely qualifies as one of those “rogue states” that “threaten our values.”

If we take him at his word, President McCain would launch a campaign for “regime change” in Moscow, just as we did in Iraq.  Prefiguring the revolutionary Jacobinism of Bush’s second inaugural address, which proclaimed the goal of U.S. foreign policy to be “ending tyranny in our world,” McCain was straining at the bit to launch a global crusade while George W. Bush was still touting the virtues of a more “humble foreign policy.”  

Neither time nor bitter experience has mitigated his militancy.  

The Madness Of John McCain