jaketapper: to translate from twitterese: WH says “We have to deal with the Iran we HAVE, not the one we WISH we had”…
SenJohnMcCain: that’s revisiting the cold war arguments on how we dealt with the Soviet Union
SenJohnMcCain: we must stand strong for democracy in Iran as we stood for Democracy in Poland, Germany, and Czechoslovakia
Now, I've read an awful lot about Cold War America, and I've never read anything that made me think that enacting the containment policy wasn't the right thing to do. In fact, it was indisputably the right thing to do, and once upon a time John McCain knew that. Neither the hard right nor the hard left liked containment--the hard left preferred coexistence and the hard right preferred rollback. Enacting either policy would have been completely disastrous, though it's not like neither one made any reasonable points.
But McCain's formulation is so idiotic. We didn't stand for democracy anywhere--it was the people of Poland, Germany and Czechoslovakia that stood for democracy. The extent to which we supported that shift did not include a hot war with the Soviet Union, as we let the Hungarian revolution of 1956 crumble rather than risk a hot war. Long ago, American policymakers decided that the Soviet Union wasn't dynamic or intellectually rigorous enough to survive, and basically decided to wait the regime out. A lot of rightists felt that it was immoral to allow people to be trampled under the yoke of Soviet oppression, I get that. But the alternative was far worse, which is why every president starting with Truman and ending with Bush 41, from relative doves like Jimmy Carter to relative hawks like Ronald Reagan, essentially conducted the same foreign policy. It was the only sane policy, the only one that might have resulted in both a free and safe world. I'm not claiming it was morally unimpeachable, but it was a satisficing choice, and the right one.
John McCain, though, is talking like this was a bad thing. He's obviously not arguing based on results, as the three countries he named eventually reformed. He's arguing based on a desire to further project American power into the Middle East. Thank God he's not our president.
