The McCain campaign has a lot of holdovers from the Bush administration, but among the most important of these is the person serving as Palin’s foreign policy advisor, Stephen Biegun, who also functions as McCain’s top Russia advisor.  As Paul Weyrich notes here, Biegun was partly responsible for drafting the 2002 National Security Strategy that outlined the preventive war core of the Bush Doctrine.  From 2001-03, Biegun was executive secretary of the NSC, and so was at the heart of administration policymaking at its most reckless and dangerous. 

This tells me not only that Palin should have been more familiar with the subject matter than she was, but that her policy views take the most extreme form of interventionism possible.  Her prepared remarks for the anti-Iran rally, published in The New York Sun, confirm this.  As Steve Clemons observed when there were reports that Biegun would be advising Palin, it meant that Biegun “will turn her into an advocate of Cheneyism and Cheney’s view of national-security issues.”  Biegun is head of the Moscow office for the International Republican Institute, which is one of the more obnoxious organizations engaged in political meddling in former Soviet space and elsewhere in the world.  While McCain’s Russophobia seems as personal and visceral as any of his other views, Biegun is as important for understanding McCain’s anti-Russian attitudes as the presence of Scheunemann as an advisor to the campaign.  The Moscow Times quoted Biegun as saying this earlier this year:

I think there’s a fundamental false trade-off that many people make, and most certainly the Bush administration has accepted this false trade-off, that if you talk about democracy and you stand up for human rights, you’re going to alienate President Putin and you’re not going to get him to do the real things that matter to America.

This would be the same administration that sent Cheney to Vilnius and then to Kazakhstan to lecture Russia on its lack of democracy, backed all three “color” revolutions in former Soviet republics and pressed for NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia, but which still thinks that the Russians should cooperate with us on Iran.  They don’t seem to recognize that the trade-off exists, or if they do they are quite willing to alienate Moscow if it allows them to keep wrapping up hegemony in the cloak of democracy promotion.  Biegun’s remarks suggest that he does not understand Russia even as well as the current administration, or else it means that he is even more ideologically driven in his support for democracy promotion than the current administration, which he seems to think is compromising its commitment to the same.