U.S. Senator John McCain will talk to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council tonight in Santa Monica, just days after returning from a trip to Ukraine where he was outspoken in attacking Russia for its move into Crimea.
The dinner event will be held at Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel at 7:30 pm.
McCain will also talk about his views of America’s larger role in the world, based on his extensive international experience and frequent foreign travel.
McCain, who is on the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Committee on Foreign Relations, has consistently argued for a strong US foreign policy.
In Ukraine this weekend, he said “Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country” and called for “a fundamental reassessment” of the U.S. relationship with Russian President Valdimir Putin.
The Republican Party candidate for the Presidency in 2008, McCain entered politics in 1982 as a Congressman from Arizona, and has been in the Senate since 1987.
He was a navy pilot during the Vietnam War, and after his plane was shot down in 1967 he was held as a prisoner of war in Hanoi until 1973. He subsequently played a major role in helping to restore diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Vietnam.
McCain keeps up a robust travel schedule – in 2011 he flew to Libya to meet anti-Gaddafi rebels while the civil war was ongoing, and last year he traveled inside Syria to meet anti-government fighters, whom he thinks the U.S. should be providing with heavy weapons in their fight with President Assad.
Before this past weekend’s trip, McCain visited anti-regime protesters in Ukraine’s capital, Kiev in December 2013 to support their campaign for stronger ties with Europe, not Russia.
