McCain's Senior Team

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

Like the foreign-policy and national-security team of Texas Gov. George W. Bush, McCain's formal group is a mixed bag. In addition to Brzezinski, Hagel, Kirkpatrick and Kissinger, it includes Richard Burt, former envoy to West Germany; former secretary of state Lawrence Eagleburger; Adm. Chuck Larson, a McCain classmate at Annapolis and former commander in chief of Pacific forces; former Navy secretary John Lehman; former national-security adviser Robert "Bud" McFarlane; professor Richard Shultz of Tufts University; and President Clinton's first CIA director, R. James Woolsey.

Unlike the Bush team, which is dominated by individuals in their 40s and 50s (see "National Security," Oct. 25, 1999), at least a third of the McCain group are senior figures who are too old to serve in a future administration, notes American Foreign Policy Council President Herman Pirchner Jr. "McCain should do what Bush has done -- namely, publicly put forth a team of seasoned defense and foreign-policy experts who are creative and still young enough to serve," he argues.

But McCain's impressive team lacks coherence on core Republican issues. "Hagel supports national missile defense but wants to defer a decision until it's technologically feasible, or at least he pretends to support it" says a top GOP foreign-policy veteran. "That's essentially the Clinton position." McCain's team is divided on arms control, with some favoring a more practical approach based on unilateral U.S. national interests, while multilateralists such as Eagleburger are more wedded to the arms-control process. Eagleburger provided the Clinton administration with cover during the 1999 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty debate, excoriating the Senate Republican leadership for killing the flawed pact?

But there is one consistent theme: China. None of this McCain team who served senior posts in government, with the exception of former CIA director Woolsey, is particularly tough toward Beijing. Nor is McCain himself, who lambastes the Clinton administration on the campaign trail for what he calls its "failed" China policy, but who failed to use his powerful chairmanship of the Senate Commerce Committee to limit the Clinton administration's technology transfers to the People's Republic of China, or PRC. "In the Commerce Committee, he has presided over a vast liberalization of technology transfer, of which the PRC, apart from the American companies involved, has been the most conspicuous beneficiary," says a former Senate aide who specializes in tech-transfer issues.

While McCain sat in the committee chair, the administration slashed the number of required dual-use technology licenses for sales to the PRC from 150,000 to 11,000 without serious challenge. Says the former Senate staffer, "McCain hasn't been identified with efforts to arrest this liberalization in a way that would inconvenience the military modernization of China."

Exit polls after the New Hampshire Republican primary, where McCain trounced Bush, showed that "world affairs" ranked equally to Social Security for GOP voters, as Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace observed in the Washington Post. "Public interest in foreign policy is one big reason John McCain is giving George W. Bush a run for his money," Kagan argues, citing polling data. McCain's grueling prisoner-of-war experience in Vietnam and Bush's admitted lack of seasoning in world affairs have helped McCain to convince "many Republican voters that he will be a stronger world leader."