Sen. John McCain said Sunday that a “failure of American leadership” by President Obama has wrought a destabilized world order marked by violence in Syria, increasingly ambitious cyberattacks by America’s adversaries and the seizure of U.S. vessels in international waters.
“We’re starting to see the strains and the unraveling of [the world order], and that is because an absolute failure of American leadership,” Mr. McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “When America doesn’t lead, a lot of other bad people do, and that’s why we are seeing the slaughter in Aleppo that breaks your heart.”
The Arizona Republican said that telling Russian President Vladimir Putin to “cut it out,” as Mr. Obama claimed he did in response to the alleged cyberattacks, does not suffice as a policy for combating America’s enemies in virtual warfare.
“I’m sure that when Vladimir Putin was told ’cut it out,’ I’m sure that Vladimir Putin immediately stopped all cyber activity,” Mr. McCain said sarcastically. “The fact is, they are hacking every single day in other areas of our military and all kinds of different aspects of American life that they are able to penetrate, and we have no strategy, nor do we have any policy toward that, and it’s very disturbing.”
Mr. McCain reiterated his call for a select congressional committee to investigate whether Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee in an attempt to undermine the presidential election.
“We need a select committee, we need to get to the bottom of this, we need to find out exactly what was done and what the implications of the attacks were, especially if they had an effect on our election,” he said. “There’s no doubt they were interfering, no doubt there were cyberattacks. The question now is how much and what damage and what should the United States of America do.”
• Bradford Richardson can be reached at brichardson@washingtontimes.com.
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