It is the first time a presidential candidate announced a proposal ahead of a November election since the first President Bush did so in 1988, in his "Read My Lips" speech at the Republican National Convention in which he falsely promised "No New Taxes."
"McCain's strategy is bold, to tell the American people, and the world, where he stands on an issue before an election," said Harvard revisionist historian Norman Jeffreys. "Usually, the winner boils down to who gets more mud to stick, who wins the media and who spends more money. I just cannot stress enough how bold this is."
McCain strategists, speaking on condition of anonymity because they have not been authorized to discuss the policy until McCain's speech at the war memorial here, said the foreign policy plan includes disengaging from all nations that don't provide any oil or have any export-import relations with the United States.
The policy also calls for engaging-disengaging with all countries that practice terror, except for those terrorist nations that supply oil to the United States or have import-export relations with the United States.
The McCain strategy also calls for an open-closed door policy to countries that have nuclear arms, those building them or those considering them, a proposal Brookings Institute international relations scholar Johansson Bowman declared as the most far-reaching "approach to international relations since the George Washington administration."
"His policy to isolate largely from the rest of the world, other than most of the world is unprecedented," Bowman said. "The world is either with the United States or against the United States, and McCain's policy captures that wonderfully."
The proposal comes days after McCain blasted Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic candidate, when Obama said if elected he would engage with Costa Rica, the tiny Central American country that has no military or any business relations with the United States.
"That Obama would engage with a country, with people who don't hate us, who don't want to kill us and who don't want to blow us off the face of the earth defies logic," McCain said in an interview on the Fox News Channel.
Obama operatives said they would unveil their own foreign policy plan following McCain's announcement Wednesday.
"We are planning on offering an olive branch to Japan, to settle their horrific acts against us at Pearl Harbor," an Obama operative said on condition of anonymity. "We will also alert the world that, Japan as our example, that we won't hesitate to drop the nuclear bomb again."
Presidential strategists applauded Obama's forthcoming proposal. Jonathon Scotia, a presidential analyst with the Heritage Foundation, suggested McCain should counter Obama, and tell voters he wouldn't "hesitate to drop nuclear bombs."
