‘‘I have strong disagreements, and we’ve just been through several of them, and that’s my position,’’ he said.

‘‘I’ve said I would support the nominee of the party,’’ McCain, an Arizona Republican, said in an interview on CBS’s ‘‘Face the Nation,’’ from the US Embassy in Kabul.

WASHINGTON — Senator John McCain said Sunday that he remains concerned about Donald Trump’s foreign policy acumen but is nevertheless standing by a pledge to back the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.

McCain, the 2008 GOP nominee, also criticized presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Asked by CBS’s John Dickerson which candidate would handle complex foreign policy matters better, McCain declined to choose between Clinton and Trump, saying he has been unimpressed by both.


‘‘I don’t think either one of them has displayed what I think is the necessary strategy and outlook — the planning and reliance on our military leaders — that will be necessary to succeed,’’ he said.

‘‘I hope that whichever one is president that they would call in the David Petraeuses and the Robert Fords and the Ryan Crockers and those individuals, both military and State Department, and diplomats who succeeded in Iraq before the president gave it all away, who know what we need to do to defeat this threat, both militarily and diplomatically and in other ways,’’ McCain said. “And either one of them should call them in and do what they recommend, and that way we can still succeed because America is still the strongest nation on Earth.’’

McCain was the subject of one of Trump’s most memorable campaign insults. Last summer, Trump declared that the senator, a prisoner of war during the Vietnam conflict, is ‘‘not a war hero.’’

McCain was joined in the interview by Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who was one of Trump’s primary opponents and is one of his harshest critics. Graham also knocked Trump on foreign policy, citing his willingness to leave Syria’s president, Bashar Assad, in power, but was more charitable toward Clinton.


Clinton “said she wants a no-fly zone in Syria,’’ Graham said. “That is a great step in the right direction.’’

In a separate development Sunday, a spokesman for Mike Pence, Indiana’s governor, said that Pence and his wife met with Trump and his wife Saturday. Pence spokesman Marc Lotter said the two couples had a ‘‘warm, productive’’ meeting before Pence returned to Indiana. But the spokesman said ‘‘nothing was offered’’ when asked if Trump discussed the possibility of Pence becoming his running mate.

People with direct knowledge of Trump’s vetting process say his list includes Pence, former House speaker Newt Gingrich, Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, and Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama.

Also Sunday, news reports said a version of the anti-Clinton image tweeted by Trump that featured a six-point star resembling the Star of David atop a pile of money appeared earlier on a white supremacist website. Trump’s account tweeted, then deleted, the so-called ‘‘meme’’ Saturday shortly after a social media uproar about potentially anti-Semitic undertones.