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The cover of John McCain and Mark Salter’s book The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights, and Other Appreciations (Simon & Schuster).

When the G7 summit in Quebec ended with President Donald Trump labelling Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “weak and dishonest” for pushing back on U.S. steel and aluminum tariffs, one of the first Americans to respond was John McCain.

“To our allies: bipartisan majorities of Americans remain pro-free trade, pro-globalization & supportive of alliances based on 70 years of shared values,” he wrote. “Americans stand with you, even if our president doesn’t.”

The tweet was an encapsulation of the Arizona senator’s view of America’s place in the world and, roughly, the central message of his latest book, The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights, and Other Appreciations (Simon & Schuster). Part memoir, part defence of the liberal international order, the tome also has an elegiac quality: Mr. McCain and his co-author, former aide Mark Salter, had just begun work on it last spring when the senator was diagnosed with an aggressive form of brain cancer.

Despite this, they try to maintain a hopeful tone – as if to reassure America’s allies, as the senator did on Twitter, that the current U.S. turn to isolationism is a temporary condition. It’s a message Mr. Salter conveyed in person when we met, as it happened, on the same day the Trump administration brought down its tariffs on Canada and Mexico.

“Hang in there. This thing we have built together that has done so much good in the world and so much good for the people of our countries will survive this moment,” he said at a breakfast joint in Alexandria, Va., the quaint, historic city down the Potomac from Washington that is an enclave for the Republican Party establishment. “Our futures are inextricably linked together. … What’s good for Canada is good for the United States and vice versa.”

A casually dressed 60-something with a goatee and salt-and-pepper hair, Mr. Salter has spent half his life linked to Mr. McCain. First, for 20 years, as a member of his staff. Later, after he struck out on his own as a political consultant, he continued co-writing the senator’s books and speeches.

The Restless Wave opens with accounts of Mr. McCain’s 2000 and 2008 presidential campaigns before delving into the past decade and a half of U.S. foreign policy and closing with a section on the year since his diagnosis.

The writing process, as Mr. Salter describes it, was essentially journalistic: He would interview Mr. McCain, then shape the senator’s recollections and ideas into the text. He also spoke with Mr. McCain’s aides, fellow senators and others who were present for key moments to add detail.

Much of the book’s substance relies on Mr. Salter’s ability to reconstruct scenes from the senator’s numerous international trips. One passage describes a British colonel in Iraq in 2003 frankly explaining how the invasion was going wrong. Another, a midnight meeting at Moammar Gadhafi’s desert compound. A third relates a sympathetic encounter between Mr. McCain and an Islamic militant tortured by the CIA.

There is even a crucial episode in Halifax in the autumn of 2016. On a Saturday evening at the International Security Forum, Sir Andrew Wood, a former British diplomat, pulled Mr. McCain and two of his associates aside. Sitting around a coffee table in a room off the conference hall, Sir Andrew told them of the now-infamous dossier prepared by former intelligence agent Christopher Steele that alleged the Kremlin had compromising material on Mr. Trump.

“Our impromptu meeting felt charged with a strange intensity. No one wisecracked to lighten the mood. We spoke in lowered voices. The room was dimly lit, the atmosphere was eerie,” the book recounts. “I was taken aback. They were shocking allegations.”

The book also contains lengthy dissections of America’s foreign policy failings, from the 2003 invasion of Iraq to the crisis in Syria. On the former, Mr. McCain is contrite over his own support for the war at the time, writing that he has to “accept my share of the blame” for a conflict he now judges “a mistake, a very serious one.”

Mr. Salter is as unfiltered as the senator he has long served. He refers to nationalistic former Trump adviser Steve Bannon as a “knucklehead,” calls his ideas “stupid” and describes the President’s ideology as a “scapegoat-based, inchoate form of populism.

“It’s a cheap and easy kind of politics to throw scapegoats at voters, to say, ’You’re not happy with your life … it’s some Mexican’s fault.’ That’s stupid. It’s wrong. It’s not true,” he said. “It’s not going to help any coal miner who lost his job in West Virginia if we terminate NAFTA. Not going to train them, not going to educate them, not going to give them a new job.”

He invokes his own family history in Davenport, Iowa, as a sort of parable of American capitalism to indict what he sees as the folly of Mr. Trump’s ambition to turn the U.S. economy back to some bygone era.

“My grandfather had a feedmill, then Ralston Purina came to town one day, had machines that did things more productively for less money and with fewer people, and drove my grandfather out of business,” he said. “I left my hometown and did something else for a living. It’s the story of Canada and the United States, isn’t it? The mine plays out, you pick up and move.”

Mr. Salter gets down to Arizona to see Mr. McCain every two or three weeks. The senator has been spending most of his time lately at his country house near Sedona, receiving friends, family and old political colleagues. He says the senator has tried to keep to a work schedule, still holding a daily staff meeting. The cancer diagnosis made the book more “valedictory,” Mr. Salter said.

“He wanted it to be something bigger, about the state of politics in the country,” he said. “This book was about more than Trump, more than this moment. Trump, in two years or less, will probably be gone.”

Throughout, Mr. McCain and Mr. Salter argue for a Woodrow Wilson approach to foreign policy: America as a principled broker of world affairs and defender of international human rights. Hand in glove with this imperative, they say, the country must reject nativism at home and welcome immigrants. They also lament the country’s growing tribalism and the coarsening of politics.

Given this, it is a glaring omission that the book never addresses Mr. McCain’s own role in the rise of American populism by elevating Sarah Palin to the national stage. While Mr. McCain laments not choosing Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman as his running mate in 2008, this is apparently only because he believes he missed an opportunity to build a bipartisan ticket, not because his actual pick was so deeply flawed. He also defends Ms. Palin’s campaign performance, blaming himself for her wince-inducing television interviews – for not ensuring she was properly prepared.

Mr. Salter, for his part, says that at the time they chose Ms. Palin, they saw her only as an energetic Alaska governor who had pushed an agenda of ethics reform. What she would ultimately become, he says, wasn’t apparent.

“I’m not going to speak to what governor Palin did after that campaign, but while she was in our campaign, she embraced the senator’s views,” he said. “It wasn’t about ‘She’s going to lead some populist movement that’s going to lead to Donald Trump.’ I didn’t see that.”

The book’s only other flaw is the excessive repetition of its central thesis. That the U.S. should be a good global citizen is a welcome message to its allies, but at times the narrative bogs down as Mr. McCain and Mr. Salter interrupt its flow to explain their already well-made argument all over again.

Still, Canadian readers incredulous at Mr. Trump’s sudden attacks – economic, verbal and on Twitter – will probably forgive the earnestness with which the authors feel they must make their case. At times, it seems, Mr. Salter is just as baffled with the President’s attitude as his readers north of the 49th parallel.

“Here you have an international order that’s about 75 years old, has liberated more people from tyranny and poverty than at any time in human history and, as a side benefit, has made the United States incomparably powerful and wealthy,” he said. “But he wants to toss it aside because these knuckleheads think they’ve got a better idea.”

McCain: In his own words

On the 2003 invasion of Iraq: “But the principal reason for invading Iraq, that Saddam had WMD, was wrong. The war, with its cost in lives and treasure and security, can’t be judged as anything other than a mistake, a very serious one, and I have to accept my share of the blame for it.”

On Barack Obama failing to strike Bashar al-Assad for using chemical weapons in Syria: “It was the worst decision of his presidency, I believe, and its consequences are felt to this day. This administration’s credibility in the region was lost and with some of the region’s worst actors … It shook the confidence of our allies and emboldened our adversaries, no more so than Vladimir Putin.”

On former Trump advisers Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka: “Bigger misfits haven’t been seen inside a White House since William Taft got stuck in his bathtub.”

On nationalism: “American nationalism isn’t the same as in other countries. It isn’t nativist or imperial or xenophobic, or it shouldn’t be. We live in a land made from ideals, not blood and soil. We are custodians of those ideas at home, and their champion abroad.”

On Vladimir Putin: “I don’t hate Russia. I want for it the same freedom, justice, and prosperity that Americans have. I hate Putin, though. I make no bones about it. I’ve been accused more than once of taking Putin’s crimes ‘personally.’ And I have. I have indeed. Vladimir Putin is an evil man. There is no better word for him. And he is intent on evil deeds, which include the destruction of the liberal world order, its values and its institutions. He is assaulting those institutions from a position of weakness. Russia’s future, its economy and stability, is bleak.”

On Putin’s (unsuccessful) attempt to keep Montenegro out of NATO: “Montenegro’s beaches are a popular haunt for heavyset Russians wearing Speedos and accompanied by their ‘nieces.’”

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