“Is Kerry the Worst Secretary of State Ever?”, Jonathan S. Tobin asks at Commentary. To paraphrase the late Bum Phillips, if he’s not, it wouldn’t take long to call the roll:
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.
Considering that the ol’ Winter Soldier and Mr. Obama share precisely the same punitive leftwing worldview, why would the president stop something that he considers a feature, not a bug?
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Update: But of course: “John Kerry, Kennedy Assassination Theorist.”
But why would a proponent of big-bigger-biggest government believe that government is lying to him — particularly, as with Van Jones’ 9/11 trutherism, he’s on the inside of it? If he didn’t trust Lyndon Johnson with the truth, why should Mr. Kerry expect the rest of America to trust his latest Democrat successor?
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