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Freedom and national security, McCain answered, beginning his rambling answer. “We can’t right every wrong, but we can do what America has done throughout our history, and that is be a beacon of hope and liberty and freedom for everyone in the world; as Ronald Reagan used to quote, a shining city on a hill. And so there are conflicts that we can’t settle. The most precious asset we have is American blood. And throughout our history, Americans have gone to all four corners of the world and shed that blood in defense of someone else’s freedom. No other nation on earth has ever done that. But we’ve also succeeded in other ways. We won the Cold War, as I mentioned earlier, without firing a shot, because of our ideology and that communism was wrong and evil.”
Without firing a shot? Limit the Cold War to the Warsaw Pact’s sudden collapse, and you can see what he means. But before that, the Cold War was almost half a century of bloody proxy wars and crushed uprisings, and in McCain’s piece of it alone, Vietnam, millions of American bullets were fired. Or does McCain think of the Vietnam war as something apart from the Cold War, as a war America fought simply to secure another people’s freedom? My own way of living with Vietnam is to consider it a well-intended miscalulation, a campaign lost in a war ultimately won — like Gallipoli — that possibly impressed Moscow as to the absurd lengths Americans would go to to contain Communism. If McCain is ready to fight another Vietnam because we’re a shining city on a hill, he needs to tell us.
