ST. PAUL, Minn. — John McCain will offer himself in his acceptance speech tonight as a presidential candidate who risked his political career in order to prevent a costly U.S. defeat in a region vital to the national interest.

The Republican nominee will thus attempt to leave the dangerous territory where Sen. Jack Reed attacked him last week as a “cheerleader” for President Bush — McCain’s initial support for an invasion of Iraq that has proved to be deeply unpopular with the American public.

McCain’s campaign has sought this week to defend higher political ground — his early call for more troops in Iraq, a strategy that President Bush finally adopted last year, launching a turn toward military success more dramatic than even McCain could have predicted.

But the very success of the surge has reduced its saliency as a voting issue this year. Antiwar liberals have long since settled on Democratic candidate Barack Obama, and hawkish conservatives on McCain. But for the Republican to win anxious voters in the middle — and thus, perhaps, the election — he must make the case that his role in the surge of troops to Iraq bespeaks a brand of judgment that will answer the nation’s needs in future dealings around the world.

Governor Carcieri, among other McCain supporters, wants the Republican candidate to make the connection between international affairs and the energy crisis that hits most Rhode Islanders closer to home than do concerns about the war.

McCain’s record on the surge has its advantages, summed up in Tuesday night’s address to the convention by Democrat-turned-independent Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut. “When others wanted to retreat in defeat from the field of battle, when Barack Obama was voting to cut off funding for our troops on the ground, John McCain had the courage to stand against the tide of public opinion and support the surge,” said Lieberman. So today, he said, “our troops are at last beginning to come home, not in failure, but in honor.”

“The Sunni insurgency in Iraq is over,” said Bing West, a military author and analyst from Newport. “Al-Qaida is essentially finished” in the western province of Anbar, which the U.S. military turned over this week to Iraqi forces — a milestone of the rapid turnabout in the war.

Gen. David Petraeus, the departing U.S. commander in Iraq, “has basically got the war won, so the argument about withdrawing forces is kind of a false argument because they are withdrawing,” said West, who has written two books on the battles in Anbar.

West, who is affiliated with neither presidential campaign, said “McCain has been the most consistent senator over the last four years in arguing that we can’t lose this war because the stakes are too high.”

As former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani told the convention last night, “On the single biggest policy decision of this election, John McCain got it right and Barack Obama got it wrong.”

Democrats counter that McCain’s support for last year’s troop surge cannot undo his woeful judgment in supporting the resolution — which Obama criticized at the time — that authorized Mr. Bush to invade Iraq. As Reed put it last week in a speech at the Democratic convention: “Senator McCain seems to style the war in Iraq as beginning with the surge and ending with the surge. In reality, the war began with his vote in 2002,” Reed said.

West argues, moreover, that comparisons of the past record of McCain and Obama on Iraq may have become beside the point. “Now the real issue is in the future. It’s whether the majority Shiites are going to be willing to reach a reasonable compromise with the Sunni majority,” he said.

McCain surrogates have worked hard during this convention to establish his Senate record on the war as part of a lifelong pattern of devotion to the country that portends a stubborn insistence on making the right call in future crises — even when the political cost is high. His brother, Joe McCain, recounted to Rhode Island’s convention delegation the story of McCain’s refusal, under torture, to hand his North Vietnamese captors a public relations victory by accepting early release from a Hanoi prison.

When “the proverbial 3 a.m. phone call” comes during some future crisis, “that’s the guy you want answering that phone” and making the hard decisions,” McCain’s brother said.

The senior member of Rhode Island’s delegation in St. Paul, former Navy Secretary J. William Middendorf II, said he has confidence from years of personal dealings with McCain that the senator knows how to deal in a hard-headed way with “the nasty people” who too often wield power in other nations.

Middendorf is not acquainted with Obama, but he said the Illinois senator’s statements about how he would negotiate with unfriendly nations are reminiscent of the “naiveté” of former President Jimmy Carter.

Democrats differ strenuously. Reed of Rhode Island, who traveled earlier this summer to Iraq and Afghanistan with Obama, said he has become convinced that “Barack Obama has proven he has the judgment to deliver the change we need” on foreign policy. He stressed Obama’s plan to remove U.S. combat troops from Iraq by the summer of 2010.

Some McCain allies, including Carcieri, would like their candidate to show voters a clear link between his experience in foreign affairs and their day-to-day worries about, for example, the price of home heating oil next winter.

The United States has effectively told overseas oil producers, “We want your product and we are prepared to let you have a monopoly on it,” Carcieri said. The governor suggested that McCain is uniquely positioned to lead that debate on two fronts: his prospective role in making Iraq a stable, friendly democracy in the oil-rich Middle East, and his shift in favor of exploratory drilling for domestic oil supplies.

jmulligan@belo-dc.com