I’ve seen this @HeerJeet thread about John McCain’s funeral retweeted a lot this morning. It deserves attention, though I think the analysis here has limitations.
2. I think the main one is a failure to reckon with what McCain was — not an establishment figure or the leader of a political movement, but rather an American Cold War politician grappling with the meaning of politics after the Cold War ended.
3. McCain was a believer in the American-led international order. But the original cause motivating the establishment of that order — defense against Soviet Communism in all its malignancy — ended in 1991. Americans’ traditional skepticism about the value & importance...
4... of foreign alliances — natural for a continent-sized power surrounded by oceans — reasserted itself after that. McCain struggled against Americans’ impulse to turn away from foreign quarrels for nearly 30 years; he almost seemed to welcome the Bush administration’s...
5... strategically bizarre choice to respond to 9/11 by invading Iraq, mortgaging most of American foreign policy to the fate of one mid-sized Arab country. American leadership was McCain’s cause; the goals of that leadership he saw less clearly.
6. Honesty compels one to observe that the economic component of the international order McCain barely understood at all. He held conventional Reaganite views about free trade, but showed little conception of the threat represented by the American financial services industry...
7... its corruption and recklessness. The financial crisis of 2007-08 caught McCain as much by surprise as it did your average Tampa Bay homeowner, further damaging a Presidential campaign that was probably doomed from the start.
8. McCain’s funeral arrangements reflected the battles of his life, his desire to close the book on his difficult relationship with BushWorld and the partisan clashes with Obama. He sought, and I think mostly achieved, personal reconciliation.
9. McCain’s funeral, as @HeerJeet suggests, also reflected his widely shared distaste for Trump and all that Trump represents — the petty cruelty, brazen corruption, and personal selfishness, the spirit that would turn away from American leadership and might indeed...
10.... have never sought it in the first place all those years ago. What struck me most over the last three days was what struck me about McCain’s career: determination that the international order that saw off Soviet Communism still had meaning...
11... combined with a struggle to define just what that meaning was. It’s a struggle one might have expected in the history of a nation that has known the luxury of relative isolation, and confronted clear existential threats, and beginning in 1991 faced a world without either.
12. McCain made a statement this past week — about the most anyone can do with a funeral. It was a statement about service & spirit, and very American in that respect. But the unresolved struggle about the meaning of American leadership in the post-Cold War world survives him.
.@threadreaderapp Please unroll.
