Don't Buy Into the Weird Nostalgia for McCain

McCain was always gung-ho to send other people into harm’s way and to inflict death and destruction on other nations.

Paul Kane marvels that the GOP is no longer as dominated by McCain-like hawks as it used to be:

Polls show that a majority of GOP voters side with them, not Pence and Haley.

It’s a remarkable shift from 15 years ago, when McCain anchored his entire presidential bid around foreign policy and projecting American leadership abroad.

It is probably worth thinking about why that “remarkable shift” happened, but there is no sign of that in this article. The Iraq war receives only one passing mention in the piece, so you would not know from this piece that the war was one of the main causes of the decline in support for McCain’s brand of hawkish interventionism. McCain’s close identification of American “leadership” with constant wars did quite a lot to make many Americans doubt that the U.S. needed to be “leading” at all. The failures of the policies he supported, including the Iraq war, led to a broader reaction against and rejection of the worldview that produced them. If you want to understand why the “remarkable shift” occurred, you have to look at the extensive damage that McCain’s preferred policies did to U.S. interests and to the countries most affected by them.