Bush, McCain seem to diverge in foreign policy

In fact, Mr. Bush’s decision to accept a “general time horizon” for withdrawal from Iraq is still a long way from Mr. Obama’s proposal for a phased pullout, as the administration has not set any timeline.

Mr. McCain has on several recent occasions envisioned a date by when most American troops in Iraq would leave, although he has refused to call it a timetable. In a speech in Ohio in May, he declared that most American troops would be home by 2013. On Monday, in remarks at the side of the first President George Bush in Kennebunkport, Me., Mr. McCain embraced, if only in passing, the possibility of withdrawing most American troops by the end of 2010.

On Friday on CNN, under questioning by Wolf Blitzer, he called Mr. Obama’s 16-month proposal “a pretty good timetable.” But the McCain campaign declined to elaborate Friday night on whether this represented a change in his views.

Mr. McCain’s advisers also say that he is not opposed to talks with Iran and North Korea, and that he supported the administration’s decision to send the under secretary of state, William J. Burns, to Geneva last week for talks with Iran and European officials about Iran’s nuclear program. But Mr. McCain is against any president-to-president negotiations without preconditions, which Mr. Obama supports. (Mr. Obama’s advisers now say such talks would occur only if Mr. Obama deemed them potentially fruitful.)

Mr. McCain’s campaign continues to be a microcosm of the ongoing Republican foreign policy battles between the pragmatists and the neoconservatives like Mr. Bolton, and it is still not clear where the balance of power lies within Mr. McCain’s inner circle. So far, however, the divide between the two within the campaign does not appear as deep as it did within the Bush White House, and advisers say Mr. McCain has been able to chose when there is a policy difference.

Mr. McCain’s advisers were divided, for example, over a speech he gave on nuclear security policy in Denver in May. Two Republican pragmatists who advise Mr. McCain, the former secretaries of state Henry A. Kissinger and George P. Shultz , supported a call in the speech for a nuclear-free world, an idea they endorse as part of a “Gang of Four” of national security statesmen. But other McCain advisers, including John F. Lehman, a former Navy secretary, and Fred C. Ikle, a defense official in the Reagan administration, were opposed to the idea because, in their view, nuclear weapons act as a deterrent against an attack on the United States and its allies. In the end, Mr. Lehman said, Mr. McCain made the call in favor of a nuclear-free world.

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“He wanted to do it,” Mr. Lehman, said. “That position is McCain’s position. It’s not a cabal of Kissingerites or a cabal of neo-cons.”

But some of Mr. McCain’s pragmatist advisers remain uneasy that conservatives close to Mr. McCain — among them Mr. Scheunemann and Robert Kagan , a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace — will help him mold a more bellicose message than they would like on Iran and its threat to Israel, particularly at a time when there is widespread speculation in the Israeli news media that Israeli may bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Others who were once uneasy about the influence of conservatives on Mr. McCain say that their worries have not been realized, even as Mr. McCain has taken conservative positions.

“What I’ve seen in the campaign so far to me demonstrates that McCain is his own man, and he’s not being managed,” said Lawrence S. Eagleburger , a secretary of state under the first President Bush.

This story, Bush and McCain seem to diverge in foreign policy, originally appeared in the New York Times.

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