McCain on National Security Threats

(Crossposted from Blogs4McCain)

I invited all my blogging buddies to send me questions for me to ask Senator McCain when I was on the bus in New Hampshire. Our Fearless leader here, Seattle was the only one to respond. The question and McCain’s answer follow.

My friend (deleted) who owns Blogs4McCain and lives in Seattle which is why he is not on the bus asked me to pose a question on his behalf. “You said at one point in a debate that you’d follow Bin Laden to the gates of hell. Osama Bin Laden is still at large. Meanwhile we’ve got an increasingly autocratic leader in Putin and the nuts in Iran, North Korea and Venezuela. With so many threats, how do we prioritize them and how would a President McCain deal with these issues?

(Note…this question got the other reporters reaching for their notebooks or hitting the index button on their voice recorders.)

McCain responds:
I agree with all those challenges and some of them may be more immediate like Chavez who is raising cutting off our oil supply. It would have serious consequences. But I still stay our transcendental challenge is radical Islamic extremism. These people are evil.

Putin is going to be a thorn in our side for a long time. Clearly the Chinese are not behaving in as mature a fashion as we want them to as they emerge as a world power. We could go down the list. But the thing that seems to be spreading is this radical Islamic extremism, to wit, the arrests in Germany, the arrests in Denmark the statement by the head of our CIA that Al Queada is trying to establish bases in America. The doctors in Glasgow the fact that Bin Laden, from one of the most remote places on earth is able to get a message out that motivates, recruits and instructs radical Islamic extremists, I still think that is the major challenge that we face so I would put that as priority number one and then it is a little hard to arrange the rest because they require different approaches.

I don’t think we’re going to declare war on the Chinese. I don’t think we are going to have a military confrontation with them but unless their leaders start on a fast track maturing process, we’re going to have some difficulties with them whether it be over North Korea, whether it be visa vis Taiwan or it be support of countries like Sudan who support genocide. We all agree “we’ll stop genocide” “never again” (gesturing) you know wherever it might be but in the case of say Darfur how long are we going to thrash around and try to find some solution. You get…and yet the genocide goes on. If I could give you a solution right now by God I’d be giving a major speech tomorrow.

So, I think the challenge is this radical Islamic extremism. There’s one other challenge, if I could just mention in the grand, broadest sense, we are now seeing an historic power shift from Europe to Asia. Now whenever, throughout history whenever there has been a major power shift there has been resulting unpredictable consequences so that is something that is going to have a lot of ramifications and I am not sure what they all are but it is a reality.

Follow up by Sasha Issenberg of the Boston Globe:

Given what you say about this power shift are you concerned about the Japanese changing their constitution?

McCain:

No no. I am not worried about Japan at all. They are a mature democracy and while there may be some conflicts between China and Japan we need to encourage a lot of different centers of power in Asia including our military presence in Asia. Absolutely. And you know our new best friends are the Vietnamese. God bless ‘em. They want to have bases. They want to have trade.

David Brooks of the New York Times breaks in…

Now they tell us.

General Laughter…Question inaudible.

McCain

They study history too.