Charles Krauthammer on John McCain

Charles Krauthammer has penned his endorsement of John McCain:

The case for McCain is straightforward. The financial crisis has made us forget, or just blindly deny, how dangerous the world out there is. We have a generations-long struggle with Islamic jihadism. An apocalyptic soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. A nuclear-armed Pakistan in danger of fragmentation. A rising Russia pushing the limits of revanchism. Plus the sure-to-come Falklands-like surprise popping out of nowhere. . . .

The United States is as safe as any hegemon in history ever has been. We have unparalleled conventional military strength and a deterrent of several thousand nuclear warheads. We face terrorists because no state dares to attack us directly. If you combined al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and unsavory groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, which are a lot more careful not to attack us, the resulting group would have nowhere near the destructive power of the Axis powers in World War II, or the Soviet Union. Islamic terrorism is good fodder for those with a needlessly conflictual understanding of politics, but it doesn’t hold a candle to earlier threats we addressed without getting hysterical.

Or do you want a man who is the most prepared, most knowledgeable, most serious foreign policy thinker in the United States Senate?

McCain is not the most serious foreign policy thinker in the United States Senate. He’s not even the most serious Republican foreign policy thinker in the Senate. That would be Richard Lugar. Of particular note in Lugar’s CV: serving as Admiral Arleigh Burke’s intelligence briefer, and partnering with Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Sam Nunn to create the Cooperative Threat Reduction program, which has deactivated almost 6,000 nuclear warheads. Lugar has come as close as a senior Republican senator can to endorsing Barack Obama, and Obama has cited him as a foreign policy influence.

A man who not only has the best instincts, but has the honor and the courage to, yes, put country first, as when he carried the lonely fight for the surge that turned Iraq from catastrophic defeat into achievable strategic victory?

Iraq only looks like an achievable strategic victory when you’re not thinking strategically. The strategic beneficiary of the war is not the United States, it’s Iran.

Then there’s the claim that McCain’s petulant public response to the Russo-Georgian war was better than Obama’s more even-handed but substantively comparable response. Right around here, Krauthammer is turning into a Joe Pesci character. And finally:

Today’s economic crisis, like every other in our history, will in time pass. But the barbarians will still be at the gates. Whom do you want on the parapet? I’m for the guy who can tell the lion from the lamb.

Lions, lambs, parapets, perambulators, the resurrection and the way of life, wait, what barbarians? The Visigoths? The Vandals? I thought drawing implicit references to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire was something neoconservatives tried to avoid. So to sum it all up, in Charles Krauthammer’s understanding, we should vote for John McCain because we face threats like we did in 1941, with all the power and prestige we had in 1991, and a future like the one we had to look forward to if George McClellan won the election of 1864. There are words for these kind of visions — and medications, too.