Posted on 04/17/2008 6:09:15 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
Miami, FL (AHN) - At a speaking engagement in Florida, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev took issue with Sen. John McCain's call for a new "League of Democracies" and said any move that undermines the United Nations is a "mistake."
"Great powers set an example to the world and must give a chance to the United Nations to develop a new global system," Gorbachev said. "We must not, instead of the United Nations, propose NATO or some kind of a coalition of democratic countries, as suggested by Sen. McCain. I think that to replace the U.N. with that kind of an organization would be wrong."
"This proposal I regard as a mistake," he said.
"I think that we must reform the United Nations, we must give new functions and create new committees to properly address the problems we have. We must reform the United Nations, we cannot destroy it," Gorbachev commented during a speech at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood, Florida.
"Our political leaders and our political elites must get rid of the confrontational attitudes of the past, must get rid of unilateralism and a monopoly of domination," he said, adding that "had the U.N. been more influential, the United States wouldn't have been able to start a military action in Iraq. The U.N. Security Council was against it, even many allies of the United States were against it."
The criticism follows a speech McCain delivered on March 26 to the World Affairs Council in Los Angeles, CA. The presumptive Republican nominee outlined what he saw as a new international alliance of democratic open-market nations that wouldn't include Russia or China.
"In such a world, where power of all kinds is more widely and evenly distributed, the United States cannot lead by virtue of its power alone," McCain said.
"We have to strengthen our global alliances as the core of a new global compact - a League of Democracies - that can harness the vast influence of the more than 100 democratic nations around the world to advance our values and defend our shared interests," he added.
"We should start by ensuring that the G-8, the group of eight highly industrialized states, becomes again a club of leading market democracies: it should include Brazil and India but exclude Russia," McCain continued.
The Arizona senator said that "Americans should welcome the rise of a strong, confident European Union as we continue to support a strong NATO."
He added that "Rather than tolerate Russia's nuclear blackmail or cyber attacks, Western nations should make clear that the solidarity of NATO, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, is indivisible and that the organization's doors remain open to all democracies committed to the defense of freedom."
McCain has never proposed dropping the UN.
He wants his "League of Democracies" in addition to the UN... to build his "New Global Order."
McCain is right; Gorby is wrong, but of course he would be. He still can’t get over the fact that he was out-maneuvered by Reagan and Bush ‘41, whom he probably believed to be his intellectual inferiors.
The UN has been utterly dysfunctional since its inception. Early on, to be fair, it was basically a puppet of the ww2 allies, but once China got a seat on the Security Council, it became another proxy cold war battlefield. Then the so-called non-aligned nations (which were once led by none other than Saddam) and you know the rest.
Gorby acts like the UN is some sacred thing. If it wasn’t supposed to stand for freedom, then what was the point? Security? That was always a joke. The only thing they did reasonably well was UNESCO, till that got completely anti-democratic.
I agree. I also think it was a travesty that Truman let Eleanor Roosevelt represent America in drafting the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights and not base it on our own Bill of Rights.
Two days in a row I’m agreeing with McCain. It’s a record. A trend would be welcome.
” Well, I’ll say one thing for McCain...he certainly is different.
He can’t be pigeon-holed. I guess that’s what “maverick” means. “
This isn’t any of that Brokeback Mountain stuff, is it? I don’t stay up on the latest jargon for these things.
Remarks By John McCain To The Los Angeles World Affairs Council
“I am an idealist...a realistic idealist”
http://www.johnmccain.com/Informing/News/Speeches/872473dd-9ccb-4ab4-9d0d-ec54f0e7a497.htm
RUN from this like a beat dog. With this incompetent gov., we'll end up with both. Blackbird.
Remarks By John McCain To The Los Angeles World Affairs Council
“The risks of global warming have no borders. We and the other nations of the world must get serious about substantially reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the coming years or we will hand off a much-diminished world to our grandchildren. We need a successor to the Kyoto Treaty, a cap-and-trade system that delivers the necessary environmental impact in an economically responsible manner. We Americans must lead by example and encourage the participation of the rest of the world...”
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1991947/posts
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