My assumption has been that if John McCain becomes President of the United States this would be an improvement over George W. Bush in some respects but not on the topic of national security policy where, if anything, McCain seems to be a more committed militarist than Bush. John Judis, who despite the TNR affiliation has sound views on such things, writes “I have liked John McCain ever since I met him almost a decade ago” and finds him a relatively congenial politician, nevertheless, he’s very much opposed to McCain’s current foreign policy views:

And therein lies my McCain dilemma–and, perhaps, yours. If, like me, you believe that the war in Iraq has been an unmitigated disaster, then you are likely disturbed by McCain’s early and continuing support for it–indeed, he advocates sending more troops to that strife-torn land–and by his advocacy of an approach to Iran that could lead to another fruitless war. At the same time, he has shown an admirable willingness to reevalute his views when events have proved them wrong. The question, then, comes down to this: Is John McCain capable of changing his mind about a subject very close to his heart–again?

Judis ends up being fairly inconclusive on this question. My initial instinct when the I read the piece late last week was to say that I didn’t see any particular reason to think McCain was likely to change his mind. Interestingly, however, I was at a Cato event today where two different old-school Republican realists seemed very optimistic that McCain might shift and adopt the much more reasonable views of his friend Chuck Hagel. Again, I don’t really understand what the basis for this belief is, but it’s undoubtedly in the air and something to keep an eye on over the next couple of years.

Nevertheless, Eric Alterman, excerpting from one of his books, has a good rundown of the Bushies long-running fuckup of this policy issue. To some extent, pointing fingers is neither here nor there since we can’t just go back in time, but when you have outcomes as bad as the ones these guys are generating, it really is vitally important to note that the country is wrestling with extremely thorny problems that have gotten so thorny overwhelmingly because of George W. Bush’s appallingly poor leadership. Demands will be raised for Democrats to offer up brilliantly appealing solutions, but as on Iraq there are no brilliantly appealing solutions left precisely because the GOp has done such a bad job.

With Iraq a shambles, North Korean testing a nuclear device, and Iran pursuing uranium enrichment, The Washington Post‘s Glenn Kessler and Peter Baker revisit the “axis of evil” speech. They underplay, however, the extent to which the speech isn’t merely an ironic reminder of what a bad president Bush is, but was actually constitutive of Bushian badness. Usually, a speech is just a speech, but this was an exception. At the time, it was widely understood that the administration was contemplating a war to depose Saddam Hussein. Under the circumstances, lumping Iran and the DPRK in with Iraq as an “axis of evil” played as a weirdly diffuse and nonspecific threat to overthrow the governments in Teheran and Pyongyang. A threat that we had no capacity to carry out in the short term. This precipatated the recent round of nuclear crisis in North Korea and managed to undermine some then-ongoing cooperation with Iran on Taliban and al-Qaeda issues that stood some chance of leading to a broader rapprochment.

What’s more, as “axis of evil” apologists like Michael Rubin make clear, plunging the world into crisis and closing off diplomatic options was part of the plan. “Clinton administration attempts to engage the Taliban and the North Korean regime were folly. Any attempt to do likewise with Iran would be equally inane. Certain regimes cannot be appeased.” And, clearly, it’s true that some men you just can’t reach, but why should we think this phenomenon has suddenly become so widespread? And why not try? The Clinton administration’s efforts to pursuade the Taliban to give up Osama bin Laden didn’t work, but it was surely worth a shot, especially at a time when full-fledged war just wasn’t on the table as an option.

If it comes to war in the end, then good-faith efforts to resolve outstanding issues without war are integral to giving the war legitimacy. In the North Korean case, Clinton’s policy was working pretty damn well. It led to a non-ideal outcome, but things got much worse when we tried things Bush’s way. Cooperating with Iran, similarly, was paying dividends until we stopped trying it. Similarly, we reached a perfectly reasonable negotiated settlement with Libya even under Bush. It’s regime change as panacea that’s worked really, really, really poorly. It’d be nice if this worked — snap your fingers and get a better regime — but it doesn’t work, and not seeing that is just dumb.