Why is John Kerry eager to provide Iran with more economic benefits by publicly declaring the Iranians may actually deserve more relief? Why did the secretary of state tell Charlie Rose that the United States and Iran want the same thing when it comes to ending the war in Syria? Why does America’s top diplomat give Iran a pass on its ballistic missile tests, even though they violate U.N. Security Council resolutions? Why? Because Kerry hearts Mohammad Javad Zarif, the Iranian foreign minister.
It's hardly a secret that Kerry has a man crush on his Iranian counterpart. Even the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee intimated as much last week when he described the White House's waltz with the clerical regime in Tehran: "There are some people who are invested in this and have developed relationships and I think are trying to bend this in a way that will benefit Iran," said Sen. Bob Corker.
Democrats as well as Republicans say the White House misled them on the Iran deal. The administration said it would not allow Iran access to the U.S. banking system, but top officials are now saying that Iran may be allowed to exploit a loophole having to do with offshore banking to access the dollar that way. Permitting Iran to make dollar transactions, said Rep. Brad Sherman, "is clearly not required" by the nuclear deal. "This will set bad precedent," the Democratic congressman from California told the Associated Press, "and it will not be the last time the Iranians and/or their business partners receive additional relief."
Meanwhile the Obama White House refuses to say that ballistic missile tests are in violation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, to the dismay of allies, U.S. lawmakers, and even administration officials. According to the Washington Free Beacon, there are voices in the administration who want "to use harsher language against Iran," but "they're being overruled by others who are defending Russia and Iran's interpretation." That sounds a lot like John Kerry.
Kerry reportedly speaks to Zarif on the phone regularly. In the first two weeks of this year, the AP has reported, the two spoke at least 11 times. That's a good thing, says Kerry, because it means there's now a channel open to discuss issues between the two countries—like when Iran kidnaps American sailors, lays siege to the diplomatic missions of U.S. allies, or launches ballistic missile tests. That is, the purpose of the newly opened channel with Iran is to facilitate America's ability to complain when the clerical regime acts up.
Why Kerry boasts of this dubious achievement is partly a function of his vanity. The secretary of state seems to believe that diplomacy is the practice of mawkishly ingratiating himself with counterparts. The pictures of Kerry laughing with Zarif as well as his opposite number in Moscow, Sergey Lavrov, are evidence of something gone wrong in Washington policy-making circles. The opposite of glad-handing the Iranian and Russian foreign ministers is not war but a measure of propriety and dignity. After all, the Iranians threaten America's chief Middle Eastern ally, Israel, with genocide, while the Russians are trying to drag another U.S. partner, Turkey, into conflict. America's leading diplomat praises Zarif and Lavrov on a talk show for their "helpfulness" on Syria, when he should show contempt and revulsion for representatives of two governments that are assisting Bashar al-Assad in an atrocity-filled war on his own people.
Kerry is off the reservation, but it's the president who is giving Iran concession after concession. This makes Kerry Obama's ideal point man—the former senator from Massachusetts tells himself he's doing diplomacy while Obama lets critics at home and abroad stick Kerry with the charge of appeasement. But it's not really appeasement—it's an Obama reeducation program. He's correcting American foreign policy by changing what he's called a mindset "characterized by a preference for military action over diplomacy."
As Obama recently told the Atlantic, a "very proud" foreign policy moment of his presidency was his decision not to order strikes against Assad in August 2013 for using chemical weapons, crossing Obama's own red line. Obama believes he freed himself from what he calls the "Washington playbook," which comes "out of the foreign-policy establishment. And the playbook prescribes responses to different events, and these responses tend to be militarized responses."
The issue, as Obama saw it, wasn't just the Iraq war but the kind of American thinking that led to the war. Decades of American thinking were wrong, maybe a whole century was wrong. Obama offers a different kind of thinking: Publicly insulting American allies is honorable. The only way to avoid war is to consort with a state sponsor of terror. Peace and security is the result of giving tens of billions of dollars to a regime that is making war across the Middle East.
It's a travesty. The purpose of America's post-WWII foreign policy was to clarify a complicated and often dangerous world for the leaders of a large republic responsible for the life, liberty, and prosperity of its citizens by ensuring a degree of stability abroad. These are our allies, it said, and these our adversaries, for we know them by their actions and affections. Did it sometimes lack nuance? Yes, because it wasn't meant to be a work of art but a guide to making life and death decisions.
The "playbook" Obama disparages provided Kerry with what was surely his finest moment as secretary of state. When the Syrian despot tested not only an American president's promise but the moral content of the international order, America had to act, Kerry said, and lead. "History," said Kerry in a stirring speech on August 30, 2013, explaining why it was necessary to strike Assad, "would judge us all extraordinarily harshly if we turned a blind eye to a dictator's wanton use of weapons of mass destruction against all warnings, against all common understanding of decency."
Obama hadn't let his secretary of state know that he wasn't going to strike Assad, making a fool of Kerry. But Kerry's incoherence since then, his efforts on behalf of Zarif and Lavrov, his romance with monsters are evidence of something much more ruinous. In dismantling the global order backed by American power and leadership, Obama has left the world, including his secretary of state, unmoored.