In case you crave the actual facts, not “alt news”/opinion, the link to the text of Senator John McCain’s entire speech, given at the NATO Security Conference in Munich, is here. The link is provided by Senator McCain’s website (Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman), so unless the someone from the “deep state” has commandeered the website and altered this speech, I would vouch for the reliability. I offer this link to help those of you who may have little time to delve deeply into a subject, preferring the sensational headlines which describe McCain’s speech as a withering attack on Trump. Was there a veiled reference to the President? Yes. But when McCain offers the names of Mattis and Kelly, I urge every reader to remember that these men serve at the pleasure of none other than the President he “witheringly” attacks. Later in the conference, Vice President Pence also delivered a speech that would likely put him in the same company as McCain considers Kelly and Mattis.
So where is the withering? I asked that myself. Throwaway lines about Muslims and refugees are old and hardly believable given what has recently happened in the tenure of the new President. Alarmist? Likely. Usual criticisms, yes. From a party member, yes again. But “withering”?
For me, the real core of the speech was this paragraph:
All of us must accept our share of the blame for this turn of events. We grew complacent. We made mistakes. At times we tried to do too much, and at others we failed to do enough. We lost touch with many of our people. We have been too slow to recognize and respond to their hardships. We need to face up to these realities, but this does not mean losing hope and retreating. That we must not do.
This is a rallying cry to let go of the status quo and renew the NATO alliance in a way that is capable of addressing the perilous times McCain references throughout. But he wonders whether we have the will to do it.
So, while a Trump critique is part of this speech, the call to reformulate the NATO alliance, learning from our mistakes, is the keynote. And, without someone like Trump, would we have ever seen NATO get to this point where it is ready to seriously reconsider itself? Perhaps not?
