By Jonathan S Tobin
During his first term in office, President Obama was criticized by
conservatives for conducting what they dubbed apology tours in which he
always seemed to find something in American history for which he felt
compelled to make amends. To his surprise, neither apologies nor the
magic of his personality and historic status were able to conceal the
fact that he was far better at alienating America’s traditional allies
than winning new friends. But as awkward as the president proved to be
at diplomacy, even that experience did not prepare the world for John
Kerry. In less than a year, he has not only already repeated these
mistakes but also exceeded them. Currently on yet another apology tour
of his own in the Middle East, where he is desperately trying to
reassure moderate Arab countries that he has not sold them down the
river in his vain quest for a nuclear deal with Iran, American prestige
and trust in Washington’s word are at a low point in recent history.
In just the last week, Kerry has personally exacerbated tensions
between Israel and the Palestinians that were already complicated by his
lust for a peace deal that no one else thought possible. He stabbed
both Israel and the moderate Arab states in the back by publicly
accepting the terms of a weak nuclear deal with Iran that would have
likely started the collapse of sanctions against Tehran and put in
motion a process that would have made it possible for the Islamist state
to reach their nuclear goal. He then added to that folly by rushing to
Geneva to sign that agreement only to be embarrassed by the insistence
of the French—of all countries—that there at least be a fig leaf of
accountability for the arrangement. That blew up the P5+1 talks and left
Kerry trying to explain both his appeasement and the failure while also
obviously fibbing about the last-minute conditions being his idea
rather than the brainchild of French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius. It
must be admitted that to have done so much damage to American interests
in so little time is quite an accomplishment. Though he has plenty of
competition for the title, John Kerry may have already become America’s
worst secretary of state in history.
Some observers are wondering today whether Kerry’s decision to
essentially recognize Iran’s “right” to refine uranium and his
reluctance to include Iran’s plutonium nuclear plans in the proposed
agreement will complicate the Middle East peace process that he has
spent so much effort promoting. But to claim that America’s decision to
prioritize détente with Iran over its obligation to allies will make it
harder for an agreement to be reached between Israel and the
Palestinians. But those who are making this argument are misreading the
situation. Israelis are understandably aggrieved about a U.S. policy
shift that seems to have accepted Iran’s nuclear program as a fait
accompli. But the peace talks were already a disaster before Kerry
further alienated Israelis and moderate Arabs over his failed attempt to
appease Iran. It was possible to argue that a strong American stand on
Iran could have made Israel feel more comfortable making more
concessions to the Palestinians. But even before he had announced his
betrayal on Iran, Kerry vented his spleen about the standoff against
Israel in a way that made no secret of his belief that only they were to
blame for the failure of his idea. Having forced both parties into
talks that were clearly fated to fail due to the division among
Palestinians and their obvious unwillingness to accept statehood on
generous terms that they’ve already rejected three times, Kerry can’t
own up to the fact that his idea never had a chance and thus prefers to
blame Israel for his own errors.
The problem here is twofold.
The first is Kerry’s exalted vision of his own diplomatic skills. As
soon he was sworn in, he threw caution to the winds and embarked on a
course that a wiser man would have understood was merely a repeat of the
mistakes of the past. Better men and more skillful diplomats than Kerry
have failed under more propitious circumstances than the current
situation, in which Hamas rules Gaza and a weak and fearful Fatah holds
onto the West Bank only with the help of Israel. But Kerry’s hubris is
such that he appears to be genuinely shocked by the apparent failure of
his initiative and is now lashing out wildly and going so far as to
threaten Israel with more Palestinian violence if Prime Minister
Netanyahu does not bend to his will.
That flaw in Kerry’s makeup is compounded by another fatal
shortcoming in a diplomat: his naked zeal for the deal. The Iranians
have read him perfectly and found it possible to get the West to come
much closer to their position on their right to enrich uranium without
having to budge an inch. If Tehran’s envoys refused to accede to
France’s reasonable concerns it was because they believe Kerry and
President Obama will eventually cave in to their demands just as they’ve
moved off of their previous insistence that sanctions will not be
weakened.
All this was bad enough, but the ham-handed way Kerry’s has barged
around the Middle East making enemies was made even more foolish looking
by Kerry’s lame post-Geneva explanations for his behavior. That he did
all this only months after presiding over the administration’s
disastrous retreat on Syria and the collapse of its influence in Egypt
on his watch renders his recent tenure one of the most disastrous in
modern American history.
Kerry’s conduct must even have the White House starting to rethink
the decision to give him the freedom to carry out his plans. Though his
predecessor Hillary Clinton’s accomplishments in her four years at Foggy
Bottom were slim (other, that is, than racking up frequent flier
miles), right now she is starting to look like a foreign-policy giant by
comparison. The only question now is whether at some point President
Obama will have to step up and rein in Kerry before he does his already
troubled second term the kind of damage that will not only harm
America’s standing abroad but hurt it at home.
SoRo: An interesting note about John Kerry's ancestors (from wikipedia):
It was discovered in 2003 by Felix Gundacker, a genealogist working with The Boston Globe, that Kerry's paternal grandparents, who had been born Jewish, as "Fritz Kohn" and "Ida Löwe", in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, changed their names to "Frederick and Ida Kerry" in 1900 and converted from Judaism to Roman Catholicism in 1901 or 1902. Fritz' elder brother Otto had earlier, in 1887 or 1896, also embraced Catholicism. The "Kerry" name, widely misinterpreted as indicative of Irish heritage, was reputedly selected arbitrarily: "According to family legend, Fritz and another family member opened an atlas at random and dropped a pencil on a map. It fell on County Kerry in Ireland, and thus a name was chosen." Leaving their hometown Mödling, a suburb of Vienna where they had lived since 1896, Fred and Ida, together with their son Eric, emigrated to the United States in 1905, living at first in Chicago and eventually moving to Brookline, Massachusetts, by 1915.The village where Fritz Kohn was born in 1873 was at that time known as Bennisch and was a part of Silesia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but is today known as Hornà BeneÅ¡ov in the Czech Republic. After learning of his ancestral connection with their village, the mayor and citizens sent congratulatory correspondence to John Kerry with regard to his political pursuits.For a time, Fred Kerry was a prosperous and successful shoe merchant, and Ida and two of the children — Richard (who would become the father of John Kerry) and Mildred — were able to afford to travel to Europe in the autumn of 1921, returning on October 21. A few weeks later, on November 15, Fred Kerry filed a will leaving everything to Ida and then, on November 23, walked into a washroom of the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston and committed suicide by shooting himself in the head with a handgun. The suicide was front-page news in all of the Boston newspapers, reporting at the time that the motive was severe asthma and related health problems, but modern reports cite family sources saying that the motive was financial trouble: "He had made three fortunes and when he had lost the third fortune, he couldn't face it anymore", according to granddaughter Nancy Stockslager.John Kerry has said that although he knew his paternal grandfather had come from Austria, he did not know until informed by The Boston Globe on the basis of their genealogical research that Fred Kerry had changed his name from "Fritz Kohn" and had been born Jewish, nor that his great-uncle and great-aunt, Ida Kerry's brother Otto and sister Jenni, died in Nazi concentration camps.
Yet, Kerry is willing to bend over backwards to appease Iran, whose very name - Aryan - harkens back to its collaboration with Adolf Hitler, and who continues to engage in the same supremacism that it did then, including using the Hitler salute...
Also, it's ironic that the French derailed Kerry's Chamberlain moment. After all, he has been telling us we should be more like the French for his entire career...beginning when he met with North Vietnamese communists in Paris in 1970, which violated U.S. law.
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