McCain's Senior Team

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 13, 2000 | by J. Michael Waller

McCain's team of foreign-policy advisers may be experienced, but some have a history of plying their trade for personal financial gain overseas.

What do you think entitles you to ask such an insulting question?" It was an indignant former secretary of state Henry Kissinger calling from Asia. He was dressing down this reporter for asking him to respond to criticism that he might profit financially from the views he espouses on China.

Insight posed the question because Kissinger is a prominent member of the senior foreign-policy team of Republican presidential candidate John McCain. Those taking a more skeptical view of Beijing's intentions, such as former Time magazine Hong Kong bureau chiefs Richard Bernstein and Ross H. Munro, in their book, The Coming Conflict With China, have alleged: "What Kissinger does not say as he expresses his views on American-China policy is just how much he stands to profit himself by the very policies he urges the government to adopt."

Kissinger wouldn't directly respond. He said he joined McCain's team out of a long-standing friendship with the senator. "I would say I have no conceivable business interest" in supporting the Arizona senator's candidacy for president, he said. "I have never discussed any business with McCain."

That, however, wasn't the question What about the allegations of conflicts of interest? When giving advice on U.S. national-security policy and strategy, Insight asked, how does he separate Kissinger the statesman from Kissinger the businessman? Instead of giving a straight answer, he growled that he doesn't accept money from China, that he advises corporate clients about his views on the situations in other countries and that through his many books and articles, "my views of China are well-known." Furthermore, he insisted, "China is a minuscule part of my business."

When one gets answers such as those from the most senior member of McCain's foreign-policy team, the Arizona senator's ship of statecraft may be set to founder. National-security issues, which McCain sees as one of his strongest points, may end up being his Achilles' heel. Already there is concern among his conservative friends that McCain may lack the disposition to command, showing an uncertain sense of purpose and outright bad political judgment.

"What's the first thing you would do as president?" the Detroit News recently asked McCain.

"The first thing I would do," the candidate answered, "is call in John Kerry, Bob Kerrey, Joe Biden, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger, Dick Lugar, Chuck Hagel and several others and say we've got to get foreign-policy, national-security issues back on track."

That statement ricocheted through cyberspace, with Washington national-security experts wondering, "Is McCain nuts?" The formula doesn't compute:

* John Kerry is the very liberal senator from Massachusetts who ran Vietnam Veterans Against the War and whose dogged efforts to save Nicaragua's Marxist regime in the 1980s prompted his hometown paper, the Boston Herald, to refer to him as "the Sandinista ambassador."

* Bob Kerrey, a Nebraska Democratic senator and Clinton/Gore critic, is retiring and won't even be in the Senate when or if McCain makes it to the White House.

* Delaware Sen. Joseph Biden, solidly on the left, is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee but won't set its agenda because Sen. Jesse Helms, a North Carolina Republican, still will be the chairman.

* Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was President Carter's national-security adviser, is admired for a toughness toward Moscow that's matched by a puzzling softness toward Beijing.

* Henry Kissinger, architect of President Nixon's premature detente with the Soviet Union and the opening to Communist China, has made millions of dollars consulting with international business while advising U.S. political leaders (see "Lion Dancing With Wolves," April 21, 1997).

* Dick Lugar, the thoughtful, even-handed Indiana Republican senator, has been a key ally of the Clinton administration's failed Russia policies.

* Chuck Hagel, Lugar's eager apprentice, is a first-term Republican senator from Nebraska whom Kissinger wowed on a trip to China. Hagel is formally a member of the McCain camp's "senior foreign-policy team," with a grand total of three (count 'em, three) years' experience in the Washington foreign-policy world. (Hagel is such a Kissinger fan that he told the newspaper The Hill that Kissinger's book Years of Renewal was his "summer reading.")

McCain's anointment of these men left GOP national-security experts scratching their heads. "It shows he has a certain lack of confidence when he has so many people from wholly different environments," a former senior State Department official tells Insight.

While calling himself a conservative and often invoking former president Ronald Reagan, McCain conspicuously failed to name a single Reagan conservative whom he would summon for advice on his first day in office -- even though one of the most respected icons of the Reagan era, former U.N. ambassador Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, is part of the same "senior foreign-policy team" as junior senator Hagel.