Writing on the incoherence of McCain’s policy proposals, Sullivan gives as an example: “the League of Democracies that wouldn’t, for some reason, include India.”  At first, this struck me as something that McCain would do, since it makes no sense even from his own perspective, but it isn’t really true.  India wouldn’t want to join such a League, but McCain seems quite willing to extend an invitation to India, as he did by implication in his speech in Los Angeles when he classed India among the “leading democracies.”  It is Russia he is obsessed with excluding, and wants to oust them from the G-8 while bringing in Brazil and India, as he said in the same major World Affairs Council speech that I discuss in my column in the issue of TAC that is currently online.  If you think continuing to worsen our relations with Moscow is a priority, McCain’s foreign policy is plenty coherent.  It’s also terrible. 

For what it’s worth, he’s also committed to damaging relations with India, too, inasmuch as he wants to impose the same restrictions on them that Kyoto imposes on states that have ratified it.  Closing that loophole would remove one kind of objection to Kyoto, I suppose, but India would never ratify such measures and proposing it would sour relations.  Doing that also presupposes that making Kyoto’s ratification more politically viable is actually desirable.