An interesting article appeared recently at The New Republic. It’s written by John B. Judis, and the subject is John McCain’s foreign policy views, and the evolution of them through the decades. The article forces one to ask the question; should we speak about an evolution or devolution?

McCain began his career in Washington as a realist who, because of Vietnam, was reluctant to sanction the use of military force. He felt the United States should intervene abroad only if its national interest was directly challenged–and then only if it had massive public support and sufficient force to carry the day. That was McCain’s version of the Powell Doctrine, and it led him to call for withdrawal from Lebanon in 1983; to caution against a tanker war with Iran in the Gulf in 1987; to warn against “trading American blood for Iraqi blood” in August 1990; and to oppose the Clinton administration’s intervention in Haiti and (initially) Bosnia.

But, in the ’90s, McCain underwent a conversion. American success in the Gulf war made him less reluctant to use force overseas, and, in 1993, he became chairman of the International Republican Institute, a government-funded organization that promotes democracy and human rights abroad. Then, in 1998, during the debates over the Iraq Liberation Act and intervention in Kosovo, McCain and his chief of staff, Mark Salter, began working closely with the neoconservatives around The Weekly Standard and the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), including William Kristol, Robert Kagan, Marshall Wittmann, Randy Scheunemann, Gary Schmitt, Max Boot, and Daniel McKivergan. These neoconservatives were different from the first generation of former leftists who had opposed Jimmy Carter’s universal emphasis on human rights and had backed Ronald Reagan’s aggressive anti-communism. They were radicals who believed in transforming the world in America’s image–and under its hegemony. Emboldened by the fall of the Soviet Union, they called for an American crusade for democracy and against rogue state regimes…

If you want to understand McCain’s worldview, read Kagan’s recent book; The Return of History and the End of Dreams reflects a new iteration of neoconservatism that McCain has embraced. Whereas, during the ’90s, McCain– like Kristol, Kagan, and others–believed that the United States reigned supreme over a unipolar world challenged chiefly by rogue states, he now sees a more complicated, multipolar world in which the United States has to share power with the European Union, Japan, China, India, and Russia, while still battling foes like North Korea and Iran. “In such a world, where power of all kinds is more widely and evenly distributed,” McCain said in Los Angeles, “the United States cannot lead by virtue of its power alone.”

Most foreign policy experts would agree, but McCain puts a neoconservative spin on this analysis. He sees the world as riven by a struggle between democracies and autocracies. On one side are the United States, the European Union, Japan, India, and other representative governments; on the other are Iran, Saudi Arabia, Russia, China, and those countries whose “rulers [are] trying to rebuild nineteenth-century autocracies in a twenty-first-century world.” McCain still believes “the struggle against radical Islamic extremism” is a “transcendent issue,” but he’s subordinated it to this broader conflict. In his Hoover speech, he depicted the war on terrorism as only “part of the worldwide political, economic, and philosophical struggle … between liberty and despotism.”

 In order to fight this war, or this struggle, McCain has suggested to create a new League of Nations. Only true liberal democracies would be allowed to join this league. This league would enable said democracies to win the ‘war’ against their autocratic enemies.

Compared to hardcore neoconservatives, the above sounds quite reasonable. But there is one major problem with McCain’s foreign policy views nonetheless: it “imposes a dynamic on world politics that simply doesn’t exist.