Unfortunately, the later period of McCain’s career has been characterized by a low threshold for the use of military force and the advocacy of war on an unsustainably large number of fronts. That is another failing of his ideological approach to foreign policy: The excessive propensity to wage war is thought to be one of the failings of blood-and-soil nationalism. Yet it is plainly present in McCain’s more idealistic version too.

McCain appeals to these abstractions as much to avoid debate as to engage in it. If you do not wish to intervene militarily in an area where the Arizona senator says we must, you “refuse the obligations of international leadership.” If you wish to admit fewer immigrants for a certain period of time than would be permitted under a bill McCain sponsors, you “would rather find scapegoats than solve problems.”