Schmoozing while the region burns: Kerry (r.) meeting with Israel’s President Shimon Peres in a pointless push for Israeli-Palestinian talks. (Getty Images)
Is John Kerry stupid? This is not a rhetorical question.
Our current secretary of state and former Democratic nominee for president might’ve gotten good grades in high school, might have had decent board scores, might speak French and might have impressive recall on issues about which he voted in his 28 years as a senator.
But just as Shakespeare said you can “smile and smile and still be a villain,” you can be the sort of guy who passes every test and still be a dope. Kerry’s behavior in the present moment suggests this might be true of him.
Either that, or it reveals a vanity so overweening that, due to its denial of reality and ready acceptance of a delusion, it might be mistaken for idiocy.
Our brand-spanking-new secretary of state has spent a considerable amount of time in the Middle East over the past month. That makes sense, since the Middle East is the epicenter of the world’s troubles.
But Kerry has chosen not to concentrate on the immediate crises at hand there — the killing grounds in Syria, the roiling streets of Egypt, even (a little bit to the North) the troubles in Turkey. Instead, he’s dedicated himself to a lingering policy problem that is a) not in crisis, b) uniquely unready for any kind of forward movement at present and c) utterly beside the point at the moment.
That matter is, of course, the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians.
For the past 30 years, the foreign-policy establishment (of which Kerry has long been a leading member) believed unquestioningly that the leading cause of instability in the Middle East was the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
That conviction was shaken to its core after that solitary street vendor in Tunisia set himself afire in December 2010 and effectively set the Arab world on fire in his wake. Two months later, the dictator of the largest and most important Arab country, Egypt, was gone after massive protests ended his 30-year reign. Later in 2011, Moammar Khadafy’s four-decade rule in Libya died when a rebel took Khadafy’s life with a bayonet. Then began the Syrian civil war against the Assad dynasty that has now cost 100,000 lives.
In all these cases, the strife and political turmoil was among Arabs; nothing Israel did was at issue except when bashing Zionism might’ve been politically expedient for domestic consumption. And concerns that the Palestinian problem might inflame “the Arab street” were ludicrous, since “the Arab street” was in open revolt against the rulers of their own countries.
And that open revolt has continued, with immensely complex consequences and opportunities for US foreign policy — and all of them have to do with how the United States handles intra-Arab conflicts.
So what does our secretary of state dwell upon? He decides to use a wildly outmoded form of showmanship — so-called “shuttle diplomacy,” in which he travels back and forth between Israeli and Palestinian leaders in an effort to bridge the gap between them.
But while Israel certainly has a leader, an elected leader, in Benjamin Netanyahu, there is no one “leader” of the Palestinians. They remain split between Gaza, run by the terror group Hamas, and the West Bank, under the yoke of the Palestinian Authority. We recognize the PA; we don’t recognize Hamas. So we negotiate with one and not the other.
That alone should call into question the viability of a deal here. But meanwhile, there is a major leadership crisis among the Palestinians on the West Bank, who remain under the entropic rule of Mahmoud Abbas (the successor to Yasser Arafat), who has not faced an election since 2005.
Hishighly regarded prime minister, Salaam Fayyad, resigned this year. Fayyad’s successor lasted all of two weeks before he quit, then rescinded his resignation, but still had it “accepted” by Abbas.
Meanwhile, in Israel, Netanyahu sits atop an ideologically fragile coalition after he was weakened in an election whose politics he misunderstood and mismanaged.
In other words, there’s no deal to be made — or if there is one, it would be a meaningless deal, an agreement to talk or an agreement to consider talking about talking.
In any event, after all his labors, Kerry didn’t even get that.
This was all predictable. After the disastrous efforts to push Israel into concessions in President Obama’s first years in the White House, he and Kerry’s predecessor, Hillary Clinton, washed their hands of the conflict.
A smart man would have followed their example. After all, as Forrest Gump said, “Stupid is as stupid does.”