John McCain and Big Stick foreign policy: Bernd Debusmann

Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

By Bernd Debusmann

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Here's John McCain's model for the conduct of U.S. foreign policy, enunciated in a television interview this week: "Teddy Roosevelt -- speak softly and carry a big stick...I am a Teddy Roosevelt Republican."

As the U.S. presidential election campaign draws into its final stretch, that remark says as much about McCain's world view as campaign speeches listing foreign policy credentials, the places he has visited and the many foreign leaders he has met. McCain's assessment of Roosevelt borders on hero worship.

In a 2002 memoir entitled Worth the Fighting For, McCain devoted a 22-page chapter to Roosevelt and described him in terms that could also apply to the author: impetuous, intemperate, egotistical, self-confident, impatient, courageous.

Teddy Roosevelt, one of the four late presidents whose faces are hewn into the rock of Mount Rushmore, is widely revered in the United States, the patron saint of what McCain has called "national greatness conservatism," a belief that America is the greatest force for good in the world.

In the U.S., Roosevelt is remembered for building the Panama Canal, for giving his name to the Teddy Bear, for starting America's national parks and for winning a Nobel Peace prize for negotiating the end of the Russo-Japanese war.

In Latin America and parts of Asia he tends to be seen as the bellicose American who came up with the concept that the U.S. had the right to exercise "international police powers" to right "chronic wrongdoing" in other countries. Chronic wrongdoing as defined by the U.S., of course.

The interventionist doctrine Roosevelt proclaimed halfway through his two terms (1901 to 1909) was used by him and several of his successors to justify sending U.S. troops to Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.

"Roosevelt is the anti-hero in Latin America and a source of inspiration for today's neoconservatives," says Larry Birns, head of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, a Washington think tank.

The first foreign policy debate between McCain and his Democratic rival, Barack Obama, did little to shed light on how McCain would apply, or adapt, the "Speak softly and carry a big stick" doctrine to the 21st century and a world in which the balance of power has been shifting away from America, a trend almost certain to accelerate as a result of the worst U.S. financial crisis since the Great Depression.

On the day McCain -- who was born in 1936, much closer to the 19th century than the 21st -- talked about the Big Stick, Chinese astronauts made their first spacewalk, Russian warships were heading toward the Caribbean for exercises in the U.S. backyard for the first time since the Cold War, and the unfettered capitalism America had long held up as a model was on its deathbed.

GUNS OVER BUTTER?

America's military stick, still by far the world's biggest, is being whittled down by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In his debate with Obama, McCain suggested as one possible way out of the financial crisis a spending freeze on everything but defense, veterans affairs and social security programs. There were no takers for that guns-over-butter idea.

McCain's most extensive foreign policy outline since he won his party's nomination in March would, if implemented, antagonize China, worsen already strained relations with a resurgent (and nuclear-armed) Russia, undermine the United Nations and set the U.S. against the majority of countries not fully under democratic rule -- and that includes a good number of American allies.

"We have to strengthen our global alliances as the core of a new global compact -- a League of Democracies -- that can harness the vast influence of the more than 100 democratic nations around the world..." McCain said. Foreign Policy Magazine, an independent publication, described the league as one of his 10 worst ideas.