HE is making sense, as described in the article. He has a vision of foreign policy which is quite different in important ways from Bush's. He has always opposed torture, and has been critical of the prosecution of the war in Iraq even though supportive of it as a strategy, one for which I do not easily forgive him.
But my sense of BB's article -- and I have not had time to read the whole speech -- brings up two misgivings here.
One is that although he is emphasizing the difference from his predecessors in the Republican executive, he is not clearly speaking about the continuing, underlying similarities. In the long run, this speech is tempered to his times, but as Carol seems to sense, it does not seem fully organic to McCain's roots. I would be very wary that under changing conditions, his response patterns would fall back onto unchanging -- and unhealthy -- assumptions and hypotheses about the nature of countries and people.
The second misgiving is that a healthy dollop of what he is saying seems to have been borrowed from Obama's playbook, wrapped in a different color of ribbon.