In my post earlier today, I noted that even if John McCain's more reasonable statements from his recent foreign policy speech in Los Angeles are true, they will be largely irrelevant unless he radically changes course on his positions on Iran and Iraq. However, I missed a chance to point out several important contradictions between the anti-nuclear rhetoric in the McCain speech and his voting record in the Senate. As noted in an excellent piece by John Isaacs of the Council for a Livable World, McCain has indicated before that he is for reducing nuclear weapons (by an unspecified amount), but he has also voted four times to fund new nuclear weapons when the issue has come up in the Senate in recent years; in addition, he is on record as opposing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), an invaluable initiative that will be central to any effort to eliminate nuclear weapons. So, if he's serious about the need to show U.S. "leadership" on disarmament, Senator McCain could start by coming out against the latest scheme for designing and building a new nuclear weapon -- the antiseptically named "Reliable Replacement Warhead" (RRW) program -- and shifting ground by endorsing the CTBT. Without taking these and other concrete steps that would actually move us towards nuclear disarmament, McCain's rhetoric, appealing though it may be, is just that -- rhetoric.

In a speech in Los Angeles yesterday, John McCain adopted a more conciliatory tone regarding U.S. global leadership than we have heard from his campaign to date, much less from the Bush administration. Is he merely posturing to avoid scaring away independents and wavering Democrats, or is his approach in fact more nuanced and interesting than his tough guy image might suggest?

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