Seth Lipsky

Seth Lipsky

Opinion

Kerry’s lame lament: Utterly blind to his own failures

The newspapers were expecting the “Kerry Doctrine.”

It supposedly was to be unveiled Sunday in Secretary of State John Kerry’s commencement speech at Yale. What they got was an incoherent and insipid dirge, a marker for the Obama administration’s failed foreign policy.

The occasion was full of drama because Kerry had spoken at Yale when he graduated in 1966. That’s when he attacked the Vietnam War even before he went off to fight it.

But on Sunday Kerry failed to deliver an honest — or any — reckoning for his long-ago betrayals.

Instead he yakked (but only glancingly) about climate change and how slow the Amtrak Metroliner is. Yale deserved better.

Back in 1966, he was complaining about too much interventionism. “An excess of isolation had led to an excess of interventionism,” he quoted himself Sunday as having said long ago.

Now he was half-heartedly (if that) complaining about too little: “I can tell you for certain, most of the rest of the world doesn’t lie awake at night worrying about America’s presence,” Kerry said Sunday. “They worry about what would happen in our absence.”

Hmm. Kerry gave The Boston Globe an interview before Sunday’s speech. Asked “what a senior in college today would make of a Kerry Doctrine,” Kerry said: “I presume they would talk about engagement and diplomacy, and, you know, making an effort.”

By gum, there’s a doctrine — “making an effort.” This from the man in the office once held by Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams and Henry Kissinger.

“Getting caught trying to make peace,” Kerry added. “I think we’ve had some good initiative starts.”

What good starts? What in the world is he talking about? The Middle East peace process he launched in respect of Israel and her Arab enemies came a cropper.

Yes, George Shultz, Warren Christopher, Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice, they all tried and failed, too. Yet Kerry not only failed to learn from their failures — he compounded the problem.

He also threatened in Syria a war for which he couldn’t win support from his boss the president, let alone Congress. He opened in Geneva a formal appeasement of the Iranians, dressed up as talks over their nuclear-weapons program. He entered a negotiation on Ukraine for which he lacked muscle.

Plus he’s talking about a “pivot” to Asia. That’s the euphemism President Obama came up with to describe his global retreat. It’s been Kerry’s job to sell it.

Yet how could John Forbes Kerry possibly lead a pivot to Asia? He, after all, was the young agitator who did so much to beat the drums for our pivot out of Asia a generation ago.

Fresh off active duty in the Navy, he went to Paris and met with enemy envoys (our side’s envoys, too, he likes to point out). Then he returned to America to plump for the communists’ talking points.

He testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where he likened our GIs to Genghis Khan and accused them of war crimes. And provoked laughter and applause in questioning by anti-war Sen. George Aiken of Vermont.

Aiken asked whether he believed the North Vietnamese might “undertake to impede our complete withdrawal” from Vietnam. Kerry said no. “Do you think they might help carry the bags for us?” Aiken asked.

“I would say they would be more prone to do that than the Army of the South Vietnamese,” Kerry quipped as the room filled with laughter and applause. Our GIs (and our South Vietnamese allies) were still in combat in the jungles of Indochina.

Of course, Kerry, like all others, is entitled to a chance at redemption from mistakes he made as a young man. But if he’s done any serious introspection about the lessons of Vietnam, there was no sign of it at Yale on Sunday.

Oh, he alluded to Vietnam, but only briefly. What a shame, given that we are still in the middle of another war.

In 1966, he’d attacked the Rusk Doctrine, named for one of our greatest state secretaries, Dean Rusk, who was a principled hawk against communism in Vietnam and elsewhere.

Indeed Kerry spent decades in the Senate opposing US intervention anywhere and everywhere.

That was then. Yet now, suddenly, Kerry lamented Sunday, America suffers from an “excess of isolation.”
Wonder why.