On Israel and Palestine
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a priority for McCain. He supported President Bush’s “Road Map for Peace”, but McCain has no peace plan for the region, other than to advocate further talks. The priority is continued support for Israel: “The next U.S. president must continue America’s long-standing support for Israel,” he writes, “including by providing needed military equipment and technology and ensuring that Israel maintains its qualitative military edge.” As he told Rolling Stone in 2001, rather than searching for a way for Palestinians and Israelis to live peacefully together, “we may have to find a way for them to live apart, in peace.” McCain supports Israel’s separation wall with Palestinians.
On terrorism
Whatever his occasional differences with President Bush may have been, McCain has always been an enthusiastic supporter of the “war on terror” since its inception. “Only the most deluded of us,” he said in his 2004 Republican National Convention speech, “could doubt the necessity of this war. Like all wars, this one will have its ups and downs. But we must fight. We must.” To do so, he would continue supporting Pakistan’s military dictator, Pervez Musharraf (the United States has contributed $10 billion in aid, most of it military, to Pakistan since 2001) and “dismantle the cells and camps that the Taliban and al Qaeda maintain in his country.” McCain adds: These groups still have sanctuaries there, and the ‘Talibanization’ of Pakistani society is advancing. The United States must help Pakistan resist the forces of extremism by making a long-term commitment to the country. This would mean enhancing Pakistan’s ability to act against insurgent safe havens and bring children into schools and out of extremist madrasahs and supporting Pakistani moderates.”
A Permanent Corps of American Para-Military Forces?
McCain’s strongly supports fighting the “war on terror” through various means, including military intervention and covert special operations. He also supports a strategy of pre-emptive strikes where necessary. But he adds one more and unique dimension to the arsenal: “We also need a nonmilitary deployable police force to train foreign forces and help maintain law and order in places threatened by state collapse.” Should such a force materialize, the United States would, in effect, have a paramilitary force ready for deployment at a president’s notice.
On foreign oil
If elected president, McCain says he will have an energy strategy that will “amount to a declaration of independence from our reliance on oil sheiks and our vulnerability to their troubled politics.” The strategy includes developing more efficient uses of energy, conservation, boosting nuclear power, and “creating market incentives to encourage the development of alternative sources of energy and hybrid vehicles, and expanding sources of renewable energy.” Considering that the United States imports almost 60 percent of its oil, 10 percent of it from the Persian Gulf, it’s difficult to see how McCain’s strategy would attain “independence from our reliance on oil sheiks.” Even if the United States reduced its dependence on Persian Gulf oil to zero, the nation’s economy would still be vulnerable to the price of oil globally, and the disruptions visited on that price.
In Sum
McCain’s Middle East policy is mostly a continuation of existing policies. A military presence in Iraq, under a McCain presidency, would likely be longer and more built-up. Military intervention against Iran would be likely, should Iran continue on its present course of acquiring nuclear technology—even if that technology were not yielding nuclear weapons. McCain would likely increase military aid to Pakistan (itself an Islamic nuclear power). He would also create, he says, a “League of Democracies” that would join democratic nations into an alternative to the United Nations: Where the U.N. doesn’t or cannot act, McCain’s “League of Democracy” would, whether to intervene militarily or to address humanitarian crises. The one word that sums up McCain’s Middle East and foreign policy is this: interventionism.
