He has made the principle that the exercise of military power sets the bargaining table for international relations a consistent theme of his career ever since, and in his 2002 memoir he wrote that one of his lifelong convictions was “the imperative that American power never retreat in response to an inferior adversary’s provocation.”
NYT: Response to 9/11 Offers Outline of McCain Doctrine
So how would McCain, in the position of the President of the Russian Federation, have handled Saakashvili’s splendid little war.
Let’s look at the first issue I highlighted: "military power sets the bargaining table"
With that conviction, McCain certainly would not have refrained from bombing the runway of the Tbilisi’s international airport. He would not have let happen the Georgian army’s hasty retreat from Gori to Tbilisi without creating another highway of death. He would not have allowed the U.S. to fly in those 2,000 Georgian reinforcement troops while the fighting was still going on. Those are indeed the things that ‘set the bargain table’ and that now seem to bit a troublesome for the Russian’s.
Imagine how none of the stream of international ‘guests’ that propped up Saak in the media over the last days could have reached Tbilisi. Imagine that his Georgian army would have been destroyed down to the very last tank on the road to Tbilisi. Imagine pictures of Georgian soldiers sitting for days on some U.S. air base in Iraq while the infrastructure of their homeland gets dismantled.
McCain as Russian president would have made sure that all those things would have happened to further the Russian position at the bargaining table.
I have seen comments that the Russian’s have ‘Ledeenized’ Georgia. Those comments referred to something McCain’s fellow neocon Michael Ledeen once said:
"every now and again the United States has to pick up a crappy little country and throw it against a wall just to prove we are serious."
The Russians certainly did not do that to Georgia. The military doctrine that encapsulates "throw it against a wall" is "shock and awe". But Tbilisi still has electricity, the hospitals are intact, the TV stations are broadcasting and its international telecommunications lines are still working. Shock and awe, or ‘Ledeenizing’, would have eliminated those comforts. But that did not happen to Georgia.
With McCain as Russian president it would have happened.
The second thing I highlighted are these "provocations" of an "inferior adversary". The biggest recent one I can think of was the big July maneuver in Georgia with the participation of over 1,000 U.S. troops. If McCain would have ruled in the Kremlin, that would have been enough provocation to get rid of Saakashvili as soon as those U.S. maneuver troops left. There were many earlier provocations where Saak loudmouthed against Russia, had his people mortar and snipe Ossetians and the Russian peacekeepers and gave other reasons to get slapped hard like he should have been for his asking for NATO membership.
The Russians have been relatively quiet about all those provocations. With McCain ruling over the Russian Federation they would have answered with force simply because anything else could have been seen as "retreat".
With McCain in the lead, instead of first Putin and then Medvedev, Russia would by now probably be in a better global political situation. Short term, bullying works …
But for simple Georgians, the situation would be much worse. No electricity, no water, no food, many, many dead civilians … simply think Baghdad or even Fallujah.
It is good that McCain is not ruling Russia.