McCain’s crackpot ideas

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Fareed Zakaria rightly notes that while everyone has been beating up on Barack Obama for proposing talks with Chávez and Ahmadinejad, John McCain has quietly espoused some genuine crackpot ideas about foreign policy. Especially wrongheaded is his idea to create a “League of Democracies,” which would only antagonize Russia and China, two great powers whose cooperation the United States needs on a host of regional and global issues. (Paul Saunders ably dispatched a similar plan mooted by McCain advisor Robert Kagan and Obama advisor Ivo Daalder last August, but some bad ideas just won’t die.)

Still, it’s hard to get too worked up about it, since it ain’t going to happen. As Reason’s Matt Welch put it:

After eight years of a cranky, go-it-alone White House that won re-election in part by bashing limp-wristed Euro-weenies, the chances of another interventionist Republican winning enough good faith among grumbly allies to create a brand spanking new America-defined Club of Winners are something approaching zero.

McCain’s other big idea — excluding Russia from the G8, while formally including India and Brazil but not China — is more plausible but equally self-defeating.

I can think of many reasons why Russia doesn’t really belong in the G8. Its economy is heavily dependent on energy and its political system is trending autocratic, to name just two. Including the Russians was a stretch in the first place. On the other hand, almost everything in the chair’s summary from last year’s G8 summit in Heiligendamm concerned things that the West wants from Russia (and especially China): “a smooth adjustment of global imbalances,” “open and more favorable investment conditions,” intellectual property protection, agreement to negotiate a successor to Kyoto, greater transparency, fighting corruption, responsible behavior in Africa, and so on. Excluding them seems so self-evidently silly that I sincerely doubt McCain would go through with it were he elected.