Newsweek International's Adam Kushner has a wide-ranging, and fairly unsettling, interview with Randy Scheunemann, John McCain's chief foreign policy adviser. Where you might imagine Scheunemann would be calm and reassuring in an interview with an international weekly, he's instead quite a bit more aggressive than the McCain campaign's general rhetoric. When Kushner offhandedly describes China and Russia as allies, Scheunemann instantly snaps back that "Russia and China are obviously not allies." When it comes to Russia, he says, "They are trying to create a past historical era—not the Soviet Union, but the tsarist empire. Putin doesn’t want the 20th century, he wants the 19th century, and he’s been quite explicit about his goals. And to blame the victim for the actions of the aggressor shows a fundamental misunderstanding about what happens when aggression goes unpunished. It emboldens aggressors." Not reassuring stuff, nor the sort of rhetoric likely to get a hypothetical McCain administration off to a good start with China or Russia. One thing worth keeping in mind about great power conflicts is that they're rarely inevitable. At times, France and England have been at war, and at times they've been allies. A lot of it has to do with how leaders interact with each other, and whether they aggressively court conflict or publicly seek a constructive relationship. If you court conflict, soon enough, the other country does, and both sides build up a narrative of slights and provocations -- many of them quite real -- that lead to war and discord. But it is a choice: You can decide whether you want a relationship defined by transgressions and stare-downs, or whether you want a relationship where the overriding narrative is of alliance and both sides work to play down points of disagreement. Scheunemann, here, is courting conflict, and as McCain's chief foreign policy adviser, that's a pretty good indicator for how a McCain administration would look.
