McCain: Russia out, India and Brazil in G8

[RB TexLa]

McCain would exclude Russia from G8 nations



By Steve Holland Mon Oct 15, 2:45 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Republican presidential candidate John McCain said on Monday if elected he would push to exclude Russia from the Group of Eight conclave of major industrial nations to punish Moscow for rolling back political freedoms.

"We need a new Western approach to this revanchist Russia," McCain wrote in a Foreign Affairs magazine article outlining his views on foreign policy looking ahead to the November 2008 election.

The Group of Eight, known as the G8, includes the United States, Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Canada, Japan and Russia. Their leaders gather each year in one of their countries to discuss major economic and political challenges facing the globe.

Russia is a fairly recent entry into the group, joining the Group of Seven in 1997, and President Vladimir Putin played host to the annual G8 summit in St. Petersburg in 2006.

McCain, an Arizona senator who frequently denigrates Putin, said the G8 should again become "a club of leading market democracies: It should include Brazil and India but exclude Russia."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071015/pl_nm/usa_politics_mccain_dc_1

[Deja Q]

1. Fascinating...

:popcorn:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revanchism

Revanchism (from French revanche, "revenge") is a term used since the 1870s to describe a political manifestation of the will to reverse territorial losses incurred by a country, often following a war. Revanchism draws its strength from patriotic and retributionist thought and is often motivated by economic or geo-political factors. Extreme revanchist ideologues often represent a hawkish stance, suggesting that desired objectives can be reclaimed in the positive outcome of another war.

Revanchism is linked with irredentism, the conception that a part of the cultural and ethnic nation remains "unredeemed" outside the borders of its appropriate nation-state. Revanchist politics often rely on the identification of a nation with a nation-state, often mobilizing deep-rooted sentiments of ethnic nationalism, claiming territories outside of the state where members of the ethnic group live, while using heavy-handed nationalism to mobilize support for these aims. Revanchist justifications are often presented as based on ancient, or even autochthonous occupation of a territory, known by the German term Urrecht, meaning a nation's claim to territory that has been inhabited since "time immemorial", an assertion that is always inextricably involved in revanchism and irredentism, justifying them in the eyes of their proponents.

[RB TexLa]

3. Yep, for some people it's just hard to let go of old bogeymen

I'm sure Thompson will be jumping on next.

[LakeSamish706]

2. Thats probably one of the reasons that McCain doesn't have a ...

hope in hell of getting elected! Another thing is, what makes McCain think the US would have the greatest say in who maintains G8 status?

[rockymountaindem]

4. Great idea... piss off the world's largest energy producer

:sarcasm: