The Militarist

Presumptive Republican nominee John McCain may protest that he hates war, but no American leader has promoted it more avidly. McCain is not only the most hawkish neocon on the horizon; he genuinely sees war as America's most ennobling enterprise.

McCain, despite his protestations in a March speech that he "hates war," not only stridently backed the 2003 invasion of Iraq but has spent years calling on the United States to depose every dictator in the world. He's the candidate of ratcheting-up action against North Korea and Iran, of new efforts to undermine the United Nations, and of new cold wars with Russia and China. Rather than hating war, he sees it as integral to the greatness of the nation, and military service as the highest calling.

McCain, unlike most neocons, is no chicken hawk, but while his rhetorical points of emphasis are different from typical neocon fare, his strategic ideas are the very essence of the neocon notion that threats of unilateral preventive war should play the primary role in America's approach to nonproliferation.

The military, and an expansive view of the extent to which it should be deployed around the world, is at the very core of McCain's personal and political identity. His father and grandfather were both admirals, the former led Pacific Command during the Vietnam War, and the latter sailed in Teddy Roosevelt's Great White Fleet and helped put down the Philippine Insurrection.

To combat this alleged conspiracy of dictatorships, McCain has proposed creating a "worldwide League of Democracies," whose role would be to create an alternative mechanism to the United Nations that could facilitate coercive action "with or without Moscow's and Beijing's approval." His campaign Web site further ups the ante for conflict with Russia and China by going beyond the standard missile defense rhetoric to describe his planned shield as intended to "hedge against potential threats from possible strategic competitors like Russia and China,"

McCain referred to his foreign-policy agenda as a "vision of a new era of enduring peace based on freedom,"

He sees the nation as having an interest in fighting wars. The combat itself constitutes the advance of important moral values, elevating the country from such banal national security concerns as "safety" and creating the opportunity for heroic displays of courage of the sort McCain himself made in Vietnam.