John McCain is an American patriot, hero and politician. As the Vietnam war raged, he was held for five years as a prisoner of war at the so-called Hanoi Hilton. In 2000, he failed in his bid to win the Republican presidential nomination, a prize he finally won eight years later, only to lose to Barack Obama in the general election.



One of Donald Trump’s punching bags in 2016, the senator has returned the favor. His was the decisive vote in blocking repeal of Obamacare; he now stands opposed to Trump’s pick for CIA director, Gina Haspel, whose fate is uncertain.

McCain is dying of cancer but he won’t leave this earth without one more fight. The Restless Wave is his latest book, and Vladimir Putin’s Russia is his latest foe.

McCain proudly cops to passing the Steele dossier on Trump and Russia to James Comey, then FBI director. In a burst of 100-proof prose, McCain writes: “I did what duty demanded I do … I discharged that obligation, and I would do it again. Anyone who doesn’t like it can go to hell.” Words spoken like the son and grandson of navy admirals that McCain is.

As McCain correctly observes, Russia and Putin are engaged in an “information war” that targets “the foundation of our democracy – free and fair elections”. He upbraids Putin as an “evil man”, one he readily admits hating.

House Republicans also come in for strafing. As McCain frames things, “some Republicans investigating Russian interference seem more preoccupied with their own conspiracy theories than with a real conspiracy by a foreign enemy to defraud the United States”. Although McCain does not specifically name the House intelligence committee and the “say-no-to-everything” House Freedom Caucus, it’s a no-brainer as to where the barb is aimed.

Some Republicans investigating Russian interference seem more preoccupied with their own conspiracy theories John McCain

Turning to the Middle East, McCain is ever the warrior, romantic and proponent of regime change – a volatile brew. He acknowledges that the Iraq war cannot be judged as anything other than a serious mistake, and “accepts” his “share of the blame”. Yet it is unclear what lessons he has drawn from more than a decade of war.

He states that if the US had known that Iraq lacked weapons of mass destruction the war would not have been justified, but also claims that overthrowing Saddam Hussein and replacing him with a “rudimentary democracy” would still have been a just cause. To be sure, McCain’s preferred path – ousting Saddam, creating the world anew – was the very option that George HW Bush rejected at the conclusion of Desert Storm, the last war America actually won; the last time the US was admired, feared and respected, all at once.

As The Restless Wave makes clear, even after the failure that is Iraq McCain has remained an unflinching proponent of American intervention in the Middle East, be it Libya or Syria, and that looks like a match made somewhere other than in heaven. The US military, heavy with weaponry, light on foreign language skills and culturally ill at ease, remains the wrong instrument for nation-building and pacification in the Arab world.

To put things in context, a 2013 Pew Poll showed a Middle East that simultaneously clamored for democracy, the imposition of Sharia law and severe punishment for those who leave the faith. In Egypt, nearly three in 10 Muslims viewed suicide bombings as situationally justified – and Egypt isn’t under foreign occupation.

Still, McCain’s stance on the transplantability of democracy should come as no surprise. Going back to the 2000 election, he declared his support for “rogue state rollback”. This would have required America to “arm, train, equip, both from without and from within, forces that would eventually overthrow the governments and install free and democratically elected governments”. Suffice to say, it hasn’t been a winning strategy.

McCain leaves the Senate chamber after voting against ‘skinny repeal’ of the Affordable Care Act in July 2017. Photograph: Zach Gibson/Getty Images

McCain’s America is an embodiment of ideals, not a land of blood and soil. Despite the GOP’s embrace of populism and Trump, he is an unwavering Reagan Republican. In his words: “We are citizens of a republic made of shared ideals forged in a new world to replace the tribal enmities that tormented the old one.” McCain even goes so far as to say that speaking English is not a necessary attribute of citizenship, a position that puts him at odds with 70% of the US, let alone most members of his own party.

Not surprisingly then, when it comes to immigration McCain offers some of his tartest comments. He contends that the GOP is on the “wrong side” of progress and unloads on Steve King, Iowa’s nativist congressman. Oddly, The Restless Wave treats America First in isolation from the rise of Brexit in England, Marine Le Pen in France and Viktor Orbán in Hungary.

McCain is most joyous when describing the Senate and the US. He reminisces about colleagues who are gone, like Ted Kennedy, Henry “Scoop” Jackson and Fred Thompson, and pays tribute to George HW Bush.

In describing the country, his tone is almost reverential. McCain recalls a 2008 campaign stop at Selma, Alabama, and the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the site of America’s own Bloody Sunday. There in 1965, state troopers and police mercilessly beat civil rights protesters. A descendant of slave owners, McCain did not hesitate to share his thoughts with a predominately white audience – before he had nailed down the Republican nomination.

History matters to McCain, and for him America is and was about its promise. The book is his farewell address, a mixture of the personal and the political. “I have loved my life,” he writes. “All of it.” The Restless Wave is a fitting valedictory for a man who seldom backed down.