The United States has ignored its role as a global leader for decades said Sen. John McCain, the result being it has allowed “”seductions of authoritarian rule” to take root around the world.
Speaking to Midshipmen at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD, McCain lambasted the last several US administrations for ignoring America’s mantle of leadership. “How did we end up here?” McCain asked. Adding further, “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.”
McCain speaking to the Brigade of Midshipmen from which he graduated from in 1958, was taking another thinly-veiled shot at the Trump White House when he spoke about how the US retreated in isolationism after World War I.
McCain hammered home his point with the point that after the Great War, “There could be no more isolationism, no more tired resignation – no more ‘America First.”
The Senator was quite correct in his characterization that as a nation, “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.”
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