Sen. John McCain warned that America has ignored its role as a global leader for the last few decades, which has allowed the “seductions of authoritarian rule” to take root around the world.
“How did we end up here?” McCain asked at a speech to the Brigade of Midshipmen at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md. late Monday. “Why do many Americans ignore our moral and historical knowledge and seek escape from the world we’ve led so successfully?”
“There are many wise answers to those questions,” he said. “My own is: We are asleep to the necessity of our leadership, and to the opportunities and real dangers of this world.”
McCain also said Americans are increasingly retreating to their own “echo chambers, where our views are always affirmed and information that contradicts them is always fake.”
Both political parties have accused each other of using “fake news” to win campaigns, and President Trump has routinely called CNN “fake news” from the White House. McCain has taken other veiled shots at Trump over the last few months, including in Philadelphia this month, when he indirectly accused the new administration of refusing the “obligations of international leadership … for the sake of some half-based, spurious nationalism,” which he said is “unpatriotic.”
In Annapolis Monday, McCain seemed to take another shot at Trump by reminding his audience that America’s failure to stay engaged in Europe after World War I showed that U.S. leadership around the world is necessary for peace.
McCain said the lessons of that war were that, “There could be no more isolationism, no more tired resignation – no more ‘America First.'”
“We are asleep in our polarized politics, which exaggerates our differences, looks for scapegoats instead of answers, and insists we get all our way all the time from a system of government based on compromise, principled cooperation and restraint,” McCain added in Annapolis.
As Americans squabble with themselves, “the associations, rules, values, and aspirations that comprise the international order we have superintended for three-quarters of a century are under gathering attack from regimes that desire a world less just and less free and more corrupt,” he said.
