As a statesman, John McCain served America well in playing a key role in building peaceful relations with Vietnam around 1990.
John McCain never won the Presidency, but he tended to be on the winning side in the major foreign policy (intervention) and domestic policy (immigration) issues of his latter decades.
The problem with winning, however, is diminishing returns.
By 2008, Invade the World, Invite the World was visibly running out of steam, but the 72 year old McCain failed to pivot in a new direction his country needed, as Pat Buchanan (a not wholly dissimilar personality) had a couple of decades earlier.
Perhaps if McCain had been a little younger he would have pulled off a Nixon Goes to China switch to a new stance more relevant to the actual challenges of the 21st Century …
Isn’t it pretty to think so?
