McCain long a critic of Putin's Russia

The Republican nominee for president offered some of the harshest language yet on Russia's military incursion.

Russian soldiers sit in a tank yesterday in the centre of Tskhinvali, South Ossetia. The US senator John McCain has been highly critical of Russia's actions.

WASHINGTON // For years John McCain has been one of Russia's sharpest US critics, charging its leadership with backsliding on democratic gains and transparency, using its natural-resource wealth as a political weapon and bullying its pro-western neighbours.

So when Russia launched an all-out military assault in and beyond two separatist regions of Georgia in recent days, an attack the global community immediately condemned as disproportionate and unacceptable, the Arizona senator seemed to have every right to say: "I told you so." And he all but did. The presumptive Republican nominee for president - who once said mockingly that when he looks into Vladimir Putin's eyes, he sees "a K, a G and a B" - this week offered some of the harshest language yet on Russia's military incursion in Georgia. Presenting the stakes as strategic as well as "moral", Mr McCain urged Nato not only to consider deploying an international peacekeeping force to South Ossetia but to rethink its decision to withhold membership to Georgia, a small Caucasian country.

Although the Russian president, Dmitri Medvedev, announced yesterday he had called for a halt in the fighting, the conflict in Georgia and the quickness of its escalation opened the door for Mr McCain to portray himself as prescient on an increasingly assertive - and some say even dangerous - Russia. And it highlighted a hardline stance that sets Mr McCain apart not just from his Democratic opponent, Barack Obama, but from the Bush administration, too.

"I think he comes across as a person who realised earlier than most officials - much earlier than President Bush and the current members of the administration - what was going on in Russia and what was going wrong in Russia, with foreign and domestic policy," said Svante E Cornell, research director of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at Johns Hopkins' School of Advanced International Studies.

"If people had listened to that line of thinking," Mr Cornell suggested, "we wouldn't be where we are today." In 2006, in the run-up to the Group of Eight meeting in St Petersburg, Mr McCain criticised what he termed Russia's "brutal war" in Chechnya and its disruption of oil and gas supplies to Ukraine and Georgia as punishment for positioning themselves outside of Russia's sphere of influence. Russia, he said at the time, "continues to pursue foreign and domestic policies strongly at odds with our interests and values".

But he offered more than just strong words: he also urged world leaders to boycott the summit. This year on the presidential stump, in a major speech before the World Affairs Council in March, Mr McCain added another call for punitive action: a "revanchist" Russia, he said, should be booted out of the G8. "Rather than tolerate Russia's nuclear blackmail or cyber attacks," Mr McCain added, "western nations should make clear that the solidarity of Nato, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, is indivisible and that the organisation's doors remain open to all democracies committed to the defence of freedom."

Mr McCain's punishing stance falls on one end of the foreign policy spectrum; it is an approach supported, in the main, by neoconservatives. The other camp, often described as foreign policy "realists", favour more direct and sustained engagement. Mr Obama, who opposes stripping Russia of its G8 membership, generally falls more squarely in that camp. But in the context of Russia's outsized show of force in Georgia, Mr McCain has been winning plaudits - at least from some in the pundit set - for his early, sustained and tough stand. On Meet the Press on Sunday, David Broder, a well-respected Washington Post columnist, noted that he had drawn "a very sharp line when it comes to Russia".

"He says these people are being aggressive and imperialist," Mr Broder said. "There is no confusion, in his mind, about the character of the Putin-Medvedev government, and he is prepared, I think, to make the case that this is a demonstration of exactly what he has been arguing for." Mr Obama, meanwhile, who came out with somewhat tepid comments when the armed conflict initially exploded in South Ossetia, has found himself taking an increasingly hard line. "There is no possible justification for these attacks," he said of Russia, but added: "Georgia should refrain from using force in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and a political settlement must be reached that addresses the status of these disputed regions."

Mr Cornell of Johns Hopkins said Russia has not responded in the past to the rhetorical approach of the Bush administration - even as the administration's rhetoric has hardened. "Mr Putin has made it very clear he doesn't really care about statements; he cares about action," said Mr Cornell of the former Russian president, who now serves as prime minister. What remains tricky, however, is the lack of a one-size-fits-all approach to foreign policy.

"Depending on which international crisis you're dealing with, one or the other [approach] may be the good alternative," Mr Cornell said. "What works with Russia doesn't necessarily work with another power." @Email:[e-mail]