Roger,
Thanks for the interview and the pointer to McCain’s Foreign Affairs article (which I’d missed somehow). I found the first bit typical of McCain’s worst habit of pandering to popular opinion with seemingly self-contradictory positions (e.g., “Iraq is this war’s central front” vs. “America should go to war only . . .”). But it’s hard to find fault with his goals in the rest of the essay, and his approach seems reasonable. On the main point (Iraq) he correctly points up the stark dichotomy between his “try to win” and the Dems’ “end the war.”
I also particularly liked his admission that only China had any real influence in the DPRK, and wish he’d made a similar point about how limited our options are in Pakistan. The idea that we can dictate policy to Musharraf is risible, and any successor would almost certainly be worse.
Reading between the lines, his antiterrorism strategy amounts to the same current focus on states (versus terror groups), and the war approach (versus viewing it as a policing problem). But he doesn’t seem to want to state that clearly (which is probably politic), and apparently wants to make it “kinder and gentler” which is probably wise. I’m not terribly impressed with his demagoguery on the “torture” issue, but other than that, he appears to me to be the best of the leading candidates on defense. And this interview (and the FA article) was critical to forming that view, so I think you met your objective.
