U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry speaks at the Munich Security Conference on February 1. (Photo by Joerg Koch/Getty Images)
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has been earning plaudits in recent weeks for his aggressive effort to jump-start the Middle East peace process, putting pressure on Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in Israel to come back to the negotiating table (and straining the premier’s conservative coalition in the process). But private remarks Kerry made on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference on Syria to a delegation of American lawmakers, where he apparently expressed skepticism of the White House’s policy on the civil war there, serves as a reminder that the man is gaffe-prone, despite his sterling foreign policy credentials. Or at the very least that he’s making Hillary Clinton, always assumed to be ambitious and self-serving, look like a bona fide team player by way of comparison.
As Josh Rogin reports for the Daily Beast:
Secretary of State John Kerry has lost faith in his own administration’s Syria policy, he told fifteen U.S. Congressmen in a private, off-the-record meeting, according to two of the senators who were in the room.
Kerry also said he believes the regime of Bashar al Assad is failing to uphold its promise to give up its chemical weapons according to schedule; that the Russians are not being helpful in solving the Syrian civil war; and that the Geneva 2 peace talks that he helped organize are not succeeding. But according to the senators, Kerry now wants to arm Syria’s rebels—in part, to block the local al Qaeda affiliates who have designs on attacking the U.S. (Kerry’s spokesperson denied that he now wants to supply weapons, but did not dispute the overall tenor of the conversation.)
“[Kerry] acknowledged that the chemical weapons [plan] is being slow rolled, the Russians continue to supply arms, we are at a point now where we are going to have to change our strategy,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, who attended Kerry’s briefing with lawmakers on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference. “He openly talked about supporting arming the rebels. He openly talked about forming a coalition against al Qaeda because it’s a direct threat.”
The quick walk-back by his spokeswoman suggests Kerry either did not realize his former Senate “pals” are the most media-hungry senior pols in that chamber, or, no less bizarrely, that he believed this kind of public pressure would serve to shock the Obama administration into a change of course. But it’s hard to imagine the president visibly jumping through hoops to please two senators who have been on his case over foreign policy errors large and small, the former having famously served as his foil in the 2008 presidential election, a defeat that has clearly infected his attitude toward the White House. The comparisons being made between the scale of humanitarian suffering in Syria — 100,000 are dead and millions more displaced — with other American failures like that in Rwanda in the 1990s are not flattering to the president’s legacy. Indeed, it’s been a rough week for Obama in the history books, between this diplomatic spat and the nomination of Edward Snowden for a Nobel Peace Prize.
On the other hand, that Kerry is joining the chorus of voices arguing Washington has failed to prevent this bloodshed and needs to be doing more suggests he may have felt no other way to prod the president into changing positions. So what may ultimately be best for the people of Syria and even American foreign policy is, at least for the time being, a disaster for the secretary’s relationship with his boss. Now we may have a better sense of why Kerry was passed over for Clinton in 2009; for all of her ideological divergence from Obama, the former Senator never publicly disagreed with his foreign policy. And certainly did not do so to the president’s political enemies.
