John McCain, America’s Revolutionary Conscience

If you want to get a sense of what John McCain meant to American ideals and American foreign policy, consider the case of a Syrian defector known as Caesar. In 2013, he smuggled out almost 55,000 photos that documented the torture and killing of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in his nation’s civil war. When Caesar traveled to Washington in 2014, one of the first people he wanted to meet was the senior senator from Arizona.

The meeting, like McCain’s trip to Aleppo in 2013, had been arranged with the help of Mouaz Moustafa. A Syrian-American activist with experience on Capitol Hill, Moustafa became an important contact for the senator as McCain pressed for the U.S. to get involved in Syria to create an alternative to Assad and the jihadists who opposed him. “The Syrians whom I speak to are grieving for McCain as if they are grieving for a family member,” Moustafa told me.

Sometimes this aspect of McCain’s legacy is expressed in universalist language: He was a defender of human rights. Sometimes it is presented in a less flattering way: He simply loved war.

McCain believed in human rights and knew force was sometimes necessary to defend them. But his beliefs were grounded in a more straightforward impulse: patriotism. McCain’s support for Syrians, Iraqis, Bosnians, Kosovars, Ukrainians, Georgians, Burmese and free Russians was very American. McCain was driven by a reverence for the American republic’s revolutionary obligation as expressed in the Declaration of Independence.

It’s a tradition that goes back to Thomas Jefferson’s campaign to get President John Adams to support the French Revolution. It’s the spirit that drove abolitionists to send arms to Kansans fighting slavery before the Civil War. It is what animated both FDR’s war against fascism and Ronald Reagan’s campaign against communism.