by John McCain
Initial reports beyond the announced arrests were murky. Government officials were cautious about speaking candidly, especially about Russia’s involvement, fearing that they might still be at risk. They accused Russian nationalists of being responsible, and eventually arrested two opposition party leaders, but for more than a month they kept mostly quiet about Moscow’s responsibility. By the end of November, the New York Times had reported that the failed coup had been conceived and supported by Russia, which the Montenegrin government soon confirmed, eventually issuing indictments for the two absconded Russian intelligence agents. Still, despite the allegations, the initial impression in the West about the bungled affair was that it had been a confused, inept, and probably not very serious threat to the Montenegrin government.
I took it seriously, and I thought the most effective way to prevent another attempt was to secure the thing that the coup had been meant to prevent, Montenegro’s membership in NATO. I talked to the new Montenegrin prime minister on January 10, and pledged my full commitment to getting the Senate to ratify their accession. The vote had been stalled for months, blocked by two senators, Rand Paul and Mike Lee. Leadership hadn’t felt it was urgently necessary to overcome their objections. I tried to convince the Senate it was. Only NATO membership was likely to prevent Russia from other attempts to overthrow the Montenegrin government. I tried to bring ratification up for a vote in early March, and Paul objected, which led to a sharp exchange between us that included my assertion that the Kentucky senator was “now working for Vladimir Putin.” Senator Paul didn’t appreciate that, and I’ll grant that it was an intemperate thing to say. But it wasn’t incorrect. He might not have worked wittingly for Putin, but he was doing exactly what the Russian wanted done. It took a couple more weeks, and a commitment to being a real pain in the ass, badgering leadership, and threatening to hold up other business, but we finally cleared the Paul and Lee holds on March 28, and the Senate voted 97 to 2 to ratify Montenegro’s accession. I flew to Montenegro a few days later.
I met with the prime minister, and with senior officials prosecuting the coup plotters. They read the indictment to me, and it made clear how sophisticated and well prepared the attempt had been, and how Moscow had masterminded and directed it. It might very well have succeeded had it not been for the one defector who informed on his accomplices. I had the embassy translate the entire 135-page indictment into English, and brought it back to Washington, where I shared it with colleagues and reporters. Montenegro officially joined NATO on June 5, and is now protected by the Atlantic Charter’s Article 5, that an attack on one member is an attack on us all.
I held a committee hearing on July 13, the anniversary of Montenegro’s statehood, to examine the details of Russia’s involvement, and I invited Montenegro’s ambassador to testify. In my opening statement, I explained how nearly successful the coup had been, and I urged NATO to welcome other aspirants, and be prepared to resist Putin’s covert and overt treachery to prevent it. I warned he would continue his attacks on our democracy, and offered suggestions for how to prevent them, and take the fight to Putin. “Most of all,” I urged,
we have to stop looking at Russia and its threat to our security and our democracy through the warped lens of politics. We cannot allow Putin to divide us . . . [and] undermine confidence in ourselves. . . . We must take our own side in this fight—not as Republicans, not as Democrats, but as Americans.
Despite the good efforts and good faith of many of my colleagues who have worked to understand the threat and defeat it, we have a way to go before all Americans realize that Putin’s goal isn’t to defeat a candidate or a party. He means to defeat the West. He will try to interfere, he already is, in our next election, and the election after that, and the election after that. He will keep doing it until we prevent him. And we’re behind schedule in that responsibility.
I’m sure there are legions of committed national security officials working hard to figure out how to combat his cyberattacks, his disinformation campaigns, and his possible, even likely, effort to hack into our voting machines. But President Trump seems to vary from refusing to believe what Putin is doing to just not caring about it. Just last November he appeared to take Putin’s denials at face value. “There’s nothing ‘America First,’ ” I pointed out, “about taking the word of a KGB colonel over that of the American intelligence community.” And some House Republicans investigating Russian interference seem more preoccupied with their own conspiracy theories than with a real conspiracy by a foreign enemy to defraud the United States. Unless the elected leaders of our government provide persistent direction and leadership and resources to officials working to defend our democracy, we won’t stop Putin’s next assault. With a nominal investment of resources, and a bold disregard for our resistance, Putin’s interference in our last election achieved all his objectives. He damaged Hillary Clinton’s campaign, but that wasn’t his most important priority. Encouraging our government’s dysfunction, and disaffection and distrust in the polity were his main objectives. He sees evidence of his success every day in our polarization and gridlock.
Just a few weeks before I met with Boris for the last time, President Obama and Putin had spoken on the phone. The very next day Putin authorized fresh attacks on Ukrainian forces in the Donbass, breaking a cease-fire. He cannot be trusted. He has aided the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Syrians, and made refugees of millions more. He has deliberately and repeatedly bombed hospitals there. He claims he is fighting terrorism. But he isn’t. He’s fighting freedom. He uses terrorism as an excuse and as a method of state power. To his credit, President Trump overturned the Obama policy and supplied lethal assistance to Ukraine, and I commend him for it. But he needs to comprehend the nature of the threat Putin poses. He needs to understand Putin’s nature, and ours. Last year, he implied that our government was morally equivalent to Putin’s regime: “We have a lot of killers, too. You think our country is so innocent,” he told an interviewer. It was a shameful thing to say, and so unaware of reality. He said it as Vladimir Kara-Murza was near death, as Russian bombs fell on Aleppo hospitals, as Ukrainian soldiers defended their country from another Russian attack, as the most vile false accusations pitting Americans against Americans coursed through social media, disseminated by an army of trolls paid by Vladimir Putin to destroy the fraying bonds, established by law and norms, that hold our society together.
China is our greatest long-term challenge, and one we have yet to concentrate our resources and employ a strategy to counter. Regrettably, our shrewdest response to China’s growing influence in the Pacific and challenge to our interests and values, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, was a casualty of the President’s campaign demagoguery. The countries we would have partnered with are now negotiating a pact among themselves. The world is learning to live without our active leadership. That’s not good for the world and it won’t be good for us. That’s the real damage our distractions are doing to our interests—the spurious nationalism animating our politics, our growing distrust of our institutions and of each other, facilitated by the activities of a committed enemy. When President Trump compares us neutrally to the regime of a murderer and thug, it causes our allies and adversaries to wonder, if Americans don’t believe in themselves, why should we?
China is the challenge of the century, but Putin is the clear and present danger, the immediate threat to America, and to the world we have helped make and thrive in. We must fight him as cleverly and as determinedly as he fights us. We will stop him when we stop letting our partisan and personal interests expose our national security interests, even the integrity of our democracy and the rule of law, to his predation. We will stop him when we start believing in ourselves again, in our exceptionalism, and remember that our exceptionalism hasn’t anything to do with what we are—prosperous, powerful, envied—but with who we are, people united by ideals, not ethnicity or geography, and how faithfully we stand by those values, not just within our shores but in t
he world.
We will stop him when we are confident of our strength in the world, not merely the strength of our arms, but the power of our ideals—government by consent, equal justice, free markets—to continue transforming the world into a broadening civilization that shares them. Americans who demand that we fight globalization are suffering from a kind of antihistorical hysteria. Whose values and interests do they think created the global economy? Ours. We don’t have the confidence to compete in a global economy that operates by rules and economic principles that we practically invented? Globalization is a fact, not a policy. It won’t disappear because we don’t think we’re succeeding in it. We can’t withdraw from it any more than we can withdraw from the weather. It’s where wealth is created, invested, dispersed, exchanged. It will continue making some industries obsolete in the West and propagating new ones. We have to adjust to those dislocations, help those hurt by them, and prepare their children for the opportunities to come. But we thrive in the global economy because we open our markets to other nations and help them thrive, and create new markets, new consumers for our goods and services, and, importantly, new converts to our way of doing things, to our principles. Open trading relations help make a safer, more stable world, a more prosperous world, a more just world, which is what we did throughout the Cold War and well into this century. We overcame grave threats and huge challenges to do it. And we can overcome Putin’s less formidable challenge today. We just have to believe in ourselves and act as responsibly, as exceptionally, as four generations of Americans and twelve presidential administrations, six Democratic and six Republican, acted as we led the free world. We have to value the world we made, and not let someone who fought on the losing side of the struggle for the rules and values that govern it convince us it’s not worth fighting for.
The Iraq War caused divisions in the West. Some of our closest allies were the most outspoken critics of our decision to invade, none of them more passionately so than Germany’s foreign minister at that time, Joschka Fischer. We both attend the Munich Security Conference, where Fischer had famously directly replied to Rumsfeld’s WMD justification for the war. “Excuse me, I am not convinced,” he declared. I suspect some of Fischer’s irritation had been caused by Rumsfeld’s recent grumbling about criticism from Old Europe, presumably Germany and France, and other Western European countries, and support from New Europe, the nations of the former Warsaw Pact and new NATO members who were more supportive.
Fischer and I both spoke sharply about Iraq in Munich, he in heated opposition, and I in heated defense. We might have been confused as antagonists. But we were not. We were allies in disagreement. But allies nonetheless. He was a member of the Green Party in a coalition government with Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s Social Democrats. Schroeder would prove in time to be a Putin admirer or at least a beneficiary of Putin’s largesse. He’s now on the board of Rosneft. But Fischer wasn’t like that despite his party’s pacifist philosophy. He is a good man, and a committed ally. He supported NATO’s intervention in Kosovo, and advocated sending German troops to Afghanistan.
He asked to see me when he was next in Washington. I assumed he wanted to talk about Iraq. But he didn’t, or at least not specifically. He acknowledged our differences on Iraq but deferred their resolution to the future. “History will prove one of us right,” he noted with no rancor. What was worrying him most, he said, was the anti-Americanism spreading in Europe that our decision to go into Iraq exacerbated. He had grown up near a U.S. military base. The soldiers had been kind to him, and taught him English. Americans were part of Germany, part of Europe. Neither would be the same without the other. He went through this long, lovely recitation of the transatlantic values that united Europe with America, and how our relationship ended divisions and rivalries that had roiled the continent for centuries. Twice America had helped end wars Europeans had started, and after the last one we had promised never to leave. Our presence in Europe, our shared identity as the West, had had a profound effect on generations of Europeans, he said. Our alliance had made Europe better. It was an elegant, compelling appeal for American and European solidarity, and it moved me very much.
I had the same fear that we were losing the forest for the trees. The forest was our shared values, our history, the uniqueness of our continuing alliance. I have that same fear now, that we will let the distractions and follies of the moment debilitate our alliance, undermine our solidarity, and leave us vulnerable to the plots of a weak adversary. I addressed that fear last year at the Munich Security Conference. I hope to attend the conference again, to see old friends and talk about the future. But if I am unable to, then I am content for my speech from last year’s conference to stand as my valedictory address as a proud ally in the world order the West has built.
These are dangerous times, but you should not count America out, and we should not count each other out. We must be prudent, but we cannot wring our hands and wallow in self-doubt. We must appreciate the limits of our power, but we cannot allow ourselves to question the rightness and goodness of the West. We must understand and learn from our mistakes, but we cannot be paralyzed by fear. We cannot give up on ourselves and on each other. That is the definition of decadence. And that is how world orders really do decline and fall.
This is exactly what our adversaries want. This is their goal. They have no meaningful allies, so they seek to sow dissent among us and divide us from each other. They know that their power and influence are inferior to ours, so they seek to subvert us, and erode our resolve to resist, and terrorize us into passivity. They know they have little to offer the world beyond selfishness and fear, so they seek to undermine our confidence in ourselves and our belief in our own values.
We must take our own side in this fight. We must be vigilant. We must persevere. And through it all, we must never, never cease to believe in the moral superiority of our own values—that we stand for truth against falsehood, freedom against tyranny, right against injustice, hope against despair . . . and that even though we will inevitably take losses and suffer setbacks, through it all, so long as people of goodwill and courage refuse to lose faith in the West, it will endure.
That is why we come to Munich, year in and year out—to revitalize our common moral purpose, our belief that our values are worth the fighting for. Because in the final analysis, the survival of the West is not just a material struggle; it is now, and has always been, a moral struggle. Now more than ever, we must not forget this.
During one of the darkest years of the early Cold War, William Faulkner delivered a short speech in Stockholm upon receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature. “I decline to accept the end of man,” Faulkner said. “I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.”
Even now, when the temptation to despair is greatest, I refuse to accept the end of the West. I refuse to accept the demise of our world order. I refuse to accept that our greatest triumphs cannot once again spring from our moments of greatest peril, as they have so many times before. I refuse to accept that our values are morally equivalent to those of our adversaries. I am a proud, unapologetic believer in the West, and I believe we must always, always stand up for it—for if we do not, who will?
CHAPTER NINE
* * *
Part of the Main
(American Exceptionalism)
FRENCH WRITER AND AVIATOR ANTOINE de Saint-Exupéry authored his best-known work, The Little Prince, while living in exile in New York after France’s capitulation to Nazi Germany. He returned to the war in the spring of 1943, traveling in an American military convoy to Algiers, where he joined the Free French Air Force fighting with the Allies in North Africa. At forty-three, he was well past the age limit for pilots, and in pain from permanent injuries suffered in several crashes. At the end of July in 1944, he disappeared without a trace while
flying a reconnaissance mission over southern France. His loss was widely mourned.
While crossing the Atlantic in the company of American soldiers, Saint-Exupéry was inspired by American idealism and gave testament to it in a letter to an American friend. “If the American soldiers had been sent to war merely in order to protect American interests,” he reasoned,
their propaganda would have insisted heavily on your oil wells, your rubber plantations, your threatened commercial markets. But such subjects were hardly mentioned. If war propaganda stressed other things, it was because your soldiers wanted to hear about other things. And what were they told to justify the sacrifice of their lives in their own eyes? They were told of the hostages hanged in Poland, the hostages shot in France. They were told of a new form of slavery that threatened to stifle part of humanity. Propaganda spoke to them not about themselves, but about others. The fifty thousand soldiers of this convoy were going to war, not for the citizens of the United States, but for man, for human respect, for man’s freedom and greatness.
Of course, the objects of wars aren’t limited to humanitarian causes. Nations fight for their self-interest, their security interests, their economic interests, their cultural interests, all nations, including ours. But what has distinguished us in the great chapters of our history, the attitude that had so impressed Saint-Exupéry, whose observations are displayed today in the D-Day museum at Utah Beach, is that we have seen our interests in the world as inextricably linked to the global progress of our ideals.