CNN Panel Invokes John McCain in Praise of Biden’s Foreign Policy, Here’s What McCain Really Thought

A CNN panel convened on Inside Politics with Dana Bash erroneously invoked the memory of the late John McCain in defense of President Joe Biden’s foreign policy on Friday.

The preposterous premise was first put forward by Gloria Borger, who argued that Biden’s speech commemorating the anniversary of D-Day had “echoes of John McCain,” citing Biden’s use of McCain’s refrain about the importance of serving “a cause greater than yourself.”

“And of course,” she added, “McCain’s foreign policy would be in line, I think, with Joe Biden right now.”

Jeff Zeleny was all to happy to jump on Borger’s train, noting that McCain’s widow Cindy McCain spoke at the Democratic National Convention in 2020. “Their worldview was similar,” he insisted.

What a shallow, specious comparison this is.

McCain and Biden didn’t share a worldview or foreign policy outlook. To the contrary, their perspectives stood in direct opposition to one another’s. As a 2017 Washington Post article put it: “John McCain and Joe Biden have been on opposite sides of many crucial national security debates over the past 30 years. From Iraq to Afghanistan to Syria, the Arizona Republican and the Delaware Democrat clashed over the scope of the American military mission and the efficacy of reaching for diplomatic resolutions for these war-torn nations.”

That same article noted that both men may have balked at Donald Trump’s rhetoric, which often smacks of irresponsible isolationism. But this is hardly a basis for the sweeping claims of Borger and Zeleny. McCain and Biden may have both been averse to Trumpian impulses, but that similarity alone does not a worldview make.

It is common now for Democrats and their media allies to invoke the memory of McCain, whose outspoken opposition to Trump earned him some strange new respect on the other side of the aisle. But their claim to his mantle is an ahistorical farce.

During the 2008 election cycle when Biden and McCain’s names were on opposing presidential tickets, Biden attacked McCain in harsh terms.

“The Bush-McCain foreign policy has dug us into a very deep hole with very few friends to help us climb out,” declared Biden at the Democratic National Convention in 2008, identifying him as being “complicit” in a “catastrophic foreign policy.”

“Time and again, on the most critical national security issues of our time, John McCain’s judgment was wrong,” said Biden a month later on the campaign trail.

“John is more than wrong – he is dangerously wrong. On a question so basic, so fundamental, so critical to our nation’s security, we can’t afford a commander in chief so divorced from reality and from America’s most basic national interests,” continued Biden while discussing McCain’s support for the War on Terror.

The feeling was mutual. Back in 2014, when Biden was humiliated by former Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s claim that Biden had been “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades,” McCain quickly endorsed this view.

“He has been wrong on a lot of these issues, there’s very little doubt about that, going back to Desert Storm,” affirmed McCain on CNN.

In another notable instance from that same year, McCain mocked Biden for calling on “Russia to stop supporting men hiding behind masks in unmarked uniforms sewing unrest in eastern Ukraine.”

“Or else what? If they continue to do this, what will we do?” asked McCain facetiously while urging the Obama-Biden administration to provide defensive weapons to the Ukrainians — advice it never followed, but Trump later did.

“It is disgraceful and the rhetoric does not match the action,” said McCain in describing the Obama-Biden approach to Ukraine. The two longtime senators may have both agreed on the need to defend Ukraine now that it’s under attack, but McCain would have been incensed by Biden’s invitation of said invasion with his weakness — and that’s not all.

McCain would have been appalled by the Biden administration’s clumsy attempt to earn the affection of the rogue Iranian regime.

He would have been baffled by its attempts to stop Israel from wiping out Hamas.

And he may well have lobbied for impeachment after Biden not only followed through on Trump’s plan to leave Afghanistan, but bungled the evacuation so thoroughly that he has yet to recover politically almost three years later.

McCain was a Reaganite Republican who believed in deterrence or the idea that peace could only be secured through strength. As president, Biden has destroyed the United States’ deterrent credibility by slow-walking aid to Ukraine and catering to America’s enemies in Kabul, Tehran, and Rafah.

To compare the two is a disservice not just to CNN’s audience, but McCain’s legacy.

Watch above via CNN.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.