Benny Avni

Benny Avni

Opinion

Kerry keeps swinging for the fences — and missing

President Obama used a baseball metaphor this week to explain his foreign-policy doctrine: “It avoids errors. You hit singles, you hit doubles. Every once in a while we may be able to hit a home run.”

Fair enough: Smallball, as it’s known, can be a good strategy for teams with the relevant skills: Single, steal second, bunt the runner over, then sacrifice-fly him home. Of course, as Obama says, it’s best if some power hitters connect at the plate every once in a while.

Too bad our foreign-policy team’s in a slump. No home runs, very few doubles or even singles and a rising number of errors.

And the team’s top star/manager, Secretary of State John Kerry, keeps swinging for the fences — and striking out, when he doesn’t hit into a double play.

Privately, Obama must be upset with Kerry. The usual cheering section is starting to hiss from the bleachers. Hostile questions fill every press conference; even scribes from the New York Times are getting caustic.

It wasn’t always so. Obama’s first secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, really did play small ball. She traveled a lot, famously setting the record for frequent-flyer miles. On the other hand, people have been asking what successes she racked up. Clinton herself dodged the question early last month, and more recently, current State spokeswoman Jen Psaki was also at a loss for an answer.

Still, Clinton did avoid major errors. So fans could still hail her as a great top diplomat.

Not so Kerry, who keeps swinging away on every pitch. In every crisis (big, small, real, of his own making), he goes for the big negotiation — and walks back to the dugout empty-handed.

There he is, talking the Iranians into ending their nuclear pursuit. Then he’s with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, signing a deal to “de-escalate” the situation in Ukraine.

And who can forget Kerry (along with UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi) wooing Damascus diplomats to gently ease their president, Bashar al-Assad, from power?

Plus, spit-shine the Nobel! There’s Kerry aiming to quickly settle “the mother of them all,” as he likes to call the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, with peace to come to the Holy Land within nine months.

Swings and misses, every time.

As in “Casey at the Bat,” mighty Kerry has struck out.

Iran’s economy is flourishing again, while parts of its nuclear program are temporarily slowed. By summer, Tehran (which has a long, documented record of cheating on signed agreements) will either sign an unverifiable pact with Kerry & Co. or walk away from the table, pocketing a return to a respected place among nations anyway.

The Moscow-backed battles in eastern Ukraine are es­calating. Kerry com­plains that Vlad­i­mir Putin (surprisingly?) didn’t fulfill the Kerry-Lavrov agreement.

In Syria, Assad announced this week that he’s running for re-election. Rumor has it that the UN’s Brahimi will resign as early as today, affirming another Kerry failure at negotiating a crisis away.

Oh, and Kerry’s one diplomatic “home run” — the pact to do away with Syria’s chemical arsenal? Oops: Yet another deadline for Syria to send away all its declared chems slipped by this week. Also this week, fresh accusations of recent chemical use by Assad gained credibility, even as intelligence agencies testified that Assad maintains chemical-producing abilities despite UN inspections, and the Daily Beast reports he actually has a stock of undeclared weapons of mass destruction.

And Kerry’s nine-month deadline for a Palestinian-Israeli accord ended with a bang this week: The two sides are actually cooperating even less than they did before Kerry stepped in. The fumes of violence are in the air.

And during this week’s UN Security Council debate on the Mideast, no Arab diplomat missed the opportunity to use the word “apartheid” to describe Israel. With one closed-door comment, Kerry managed to reverse Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s diplomatic heroics of more than 20 years ago: The “Zionism is racism” talk, supposedly eradicated from Turtle Bay in 1991, is back with a vengeance.

With such a string of failures, no wonder this week’s Wall Street Journal poll found that, though most Americans want a smaller US role on the world stage, only 38 percent approve of Obama’s foreign policy.

If the president was George Steinbrenner, he’d fire Kerry tomorrow. Instead, Obama says the result of his smallball approach is that “we steadily advance the interests of the American people and our partnership with folks around the world.”

In other words, this “owner” doesn’t seem to realize the team is losing.