Opinion

The fire next time

What would foreign policy look like in a second Obama term? See the president’s response to the current assault on our Mideast embassies and add two words: John Kerry.

The famously flip-flopping senator is a leading contender to succeed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who’s already said she won’t be around much longer to answer those 3 a.m. phone calls.

Anyone watching Clinton in the current crisis can’t help noticing how tired she looks. Who wouldn’t be? For all the miles she’s racked up (more than any predecessor), all she gets to do is pointlessly spew clichés about “international obligations” to Iranians, Arabs, Chinese and Russians who just won’t listen.

Kerry is probably better suited to that role — the only other known contender is UN Ambassador Susan Rice.

Rice was doing her best on the Sunday shows yesterday to convince voters that, despite the current Mideast crisis, we’re “not impotent” — that we’re still much more loved there than we were four years ago and that the current mess is all about anger at one “heinous and offensive video.”

That’s as credible as Rice’s other assertion yesterday: that the international community is now more “united” than ever on pressuring Iran. Hmm. Her playground, the UN Security Council, is so plagued by acrimony and veto threats that she no longer even tries pushing any new resolutions on Iran or any other Mideast issue.

Despite her closeness to Obama’s ear, then, Washington’s smart money says she’d at best become national security adviser.

Kerry not only made a high-profile speech at the Democratic convention, testifying to Obama’s supposed foreign-policy success, but is also playing Mitt Romney in the president’s warmups for the coming debates.

Last week, Kerry skewered Romney for criticizing Obama during an international crisis, forgetting he did just that in his 2004 run against George W. Bush.

Well, that’s politics, but is Kerry fit to navigate America now, as the Arab Spring turns decisively wintery?

In March, Kerry proposed to set up safe zones inside Syria for civilians escaping President Bashar al-Assad’s massacres — and said we should consider arming the opposition. That’s further than even Romney’s senior foreign policy advisers Eliot Cohen and Rich Williamson have gone. Never mind. Since then, Kerry has flip-flopped on that idea, too.

Still, Kerry now clearly opposes Assad — but only after having been Washington’s most enthusiastic Assad advocate.

When the Syrian butchery started in March 2011, Clinton hailed Assad, telling CBS, “Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he is a reformer.”

Yep. That sure sounds like Kerry, who as an early, unofficial Obama emissary traveled to Damascus six times, with Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) often tagging along.

At the time, the Obama administration’s organizing foreign-policy principle was: “Do the exact opposite of Bush.” Dubya shunned Syria? They’d engage, tear Assad away from Iran and get him to sign a peace treaty with Israel.

Kerry, the 2004 loser, had more skin in the “opposite-of-Bush” game than most. He enthusiastically embraced his new role as Obama’s point man to Syria.

At a Washington dinner in late 2009, he stunned Lebanese activists by praising Assad as the antidote to the Mideast “religious-based” state. In fact, Assad was (and still is) a crucial ally of Iran’s mullahs and the very religious-based Lebanese Hezbollah.

Mostly, Kerry carried messages about Syria’s readiness to re-launch peace talks with Israel — an old ploy by the Assads, who for decades have used negotiations about Israeli negotiations to bedazzle would-be Washington allies.

Worse, one Damascus interlocutor tells me that according to Assad, many “messages” that Kerry had carried back from Damascus were, in fact, exaggerated versions of what the Syrian president actually “promised” the senator.

In other words, acting for an administration that had vowed to bring in a “reality-based” American foreign policy, Kerry was completely blind to the real Damascus. It took major carnage to end Kerry’s crush and his misguided belief that a diplomatic opening was around the corner.

This bodes ill for the future.

Until now, Obama’s image as a foreign-policy success was based largely on the public perception that he’s managed to deliver us from sinking in that sticky Mideast quicksand. Last week’s events put that perception at risk of meltdown.

And Obama at least had Clinton to counter some of his worst foreign-policy instincts these last few years. In a second term, he seems ready to surround himself with people who’d reinforce those instincts.

Twitter:@bennyavni