Republican presidential nominee John McCain is well known for his adversarial, even anachronistic, approach to Russia.
Straight talk, right?
Perhaps.
But, asks Mark Benjamin today on Salon.com, could his bluster have had less to do with the Republican base than with the lobbying connections of a close advisor?
The architect behind McCain's hard-line Russia policy, including kicking it out of the G8, is Randy Scheunemann.
And Scheunemann has until early this year been a long-time lobbyist for Georgia, Latvia, Romania and Macedonia, receiving over $2 million in pay from them.
Moreover, "much of Scheunemann's work focused on paving the way into the NATO fold. Two of Scheunemann's clients, Latvia and Romania, were admitted to full NATO member status in 2004, after which they ceased paying him".
Of course, that does not mean that any of these countries paid Scheunemann to influence McCain to enact an anti-Russian agenda. However, ""those are countries whose advantage it is to point the finger at a Russian threat, particularly Georgia,' explained Thomas Simons, ambassador to Poland under George H.W. Bush and to Pakistan under Bill Clinton".
Crucially, asks Harvard's Dmitry Gorenburg, if McCain and Scheunemann ""have had an association for a long time, how do you tell if it is because they think alike, or one has told the other how to think because he is getting paid?'”
McCain likes to say that unlike Bush, who claims to have looked into Putin's eyes and seen his soul, he saw the letters K, G and B instead.
But maybe what he really saw were the letters U, S, and D?
