What Will the Pillars of His Foreign Policy Be?

The cleavages among the Republicans date back at least to the 1976 campaign, when Ronald Reagan challenged President Gerald Ford by attacking his policy of detente with the Soviet Union and by pledging to replace the realist Kissinger as secretary of state. During general election campaigns, the Republicans usually manage to maintain a facade of unity. But after November, the internecine disagreements tend to flare up again. In March 2001, less than two months after Bush was sworn in, Secretary of State Powell said that the new administration planned to "engage" with North Korea, following the path of the Clinton administration. Within a day, after conferring with Cheney, Bush disavowed what Powell had said.

Where does McCain himself fit into the Republican Party's warring foreign policy tribes? It's not totally clear. His thinking seems to have been shaped by two formative experiences, and they cut in opposite directions. Think of two different McCains: post-Vietnam McCain and post-Bosnia McCain.

For two decades after the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, the former prisoner of war became increasingly skeptical of extended U.S. military interventions -- ones that might get American troops into shooting wars that the public might not support. In foreign policy terms, he became something of a realist. In Congress, McCain opposed or sought to limit U.S. military interventions in Lebanon in the 1980s and Somalia and Haiti in the early 1990s. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, McCain initially said that the United States should confine its response to airstrikes, not send ground forces. (He later voted for Operation Desert Storm.)

But then there's post-Bosnia McCain. In the mid-1990s, following the Serbs' brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing against Bosnian Muslims, McCain came out strongly in favor of military action to stop the slaughter. He endorsed the Clinton administration's push for humanitarian intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo at a time when many Republicans in Congress were opposed.

It was during the Washington battles over Bosnia policy that McCain forged his bonds with the neoconservatives. They, too, supported President Bill Clinton's use of force for humanitarian purposes, unlike the GOP mainstream. The political links between McCain and the neoconservatives carried over from the battles over how to deal with Slobodan Milosevic to the subsequent ones about Saddam Hussein.

Armitage and Lieberman each reflect different aspects of McCain's thinking about the world -- the two sides of his foreign policy outlook. Armitage is a good buddy of post-Vietnam McCain, while Lieberman is a close colleague of post-Bosnia McCain. If McCain were elected, the two men might coexist within the next Republican Cabinet. But they'd do it pretty uneasily.

jmresponses@comcast.net

James Mann is author-in-residence at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies. He is the author of "Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet."