Someone once asked Vladimir Putin what he thought of Senator John McCain’s suggestion that the Russian president would one day go the way of Muammar Gaddafi. Here’s what Putin said:
“McCain sat in a pit in Vietnam for several years, anyone would go nuts after that.”
And while we’re not sure if we would go so far as to call McCain “nuts” - because that would effectively exonerate him and relieve him of any responsibility for what he says - we would certainly put him the category of “uber hawk” and we don’t mean he’s angling for an FOMC hike.
As you might recall, McCain pushed hard for the ouster of Russian-backed Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine.
The good Senator even went so far as to attend a rally at Maidan and proclaim that “America stands with Ukrainians”.
We all know how that turned out.
Yanukovych fled to Russia, separatists backed by The Kremlin got angry, and the hardliners from Maidan adopted a ruthless brand of nationalism on the way to forming anti-Russian militias that Kiev is completely incapable of controlling and the conflict festers to this very day.
Oh, and Ukraine descended into economic chaos.
Of course McCain doesn't have the best track record in Syria either. Rather than get into the specifics (because we've documented them on any number of occasions) or debate whether or not certain pictures were photoshopped, we'll simply say that McCain adopted the same approach as he did in Kiev. That is, he openly supported "freedom fighters" without any apparent regard for how much pain and suffering the US causes when it deliberately seeks to destabilize regimes.
In Syria, McCain seems to have made another gross miscalculation: he assumed that US hegemony is as universally accepted today as it was two decades ago, which apparently led the Senator to underestimate The Kremlin and on that note, we present the following clip with no further comment:
