Peter Beinhart has a column in this week’s New Republic and Philip Gourevitch has (a much longer) article in The New Yorker — both on John Kerry’s foreign policy.
Gourevitch says that, in Kerry’s April 30 speech at Westminster College — where Winston Churchill gave his “Iron Curtain” speech — Kerry “shed the grandiosity and sounded more the way he does in serious one-on-one conversation, firm and direct, comfortably in command”:
He said that “America must lead in new ways” to meet “new threats,” “new enemies,” and “new opportunities” with “new approaches” and “new strategies,” to forge “a new era of alliances” and “a new direction in Iraq” . . . .
I think the operative word here is “new.””
Gourevitch concluded the above sentence after the elipsis with “. . . but there was nothing novel in the foreign policy he described.” Gourevitch believes Kerry’s foreign policy is not novel but “Churchillian” — see, Kerry realizes we need alliances; and Churchill realized he needed alliances (honest, that’s Gourevitch’s analysis).
After the speech, Gourevitch had a “lengthy conversation” with Kerry in the Westminster gym. Gourevitch asked Kerry whether he had announced a new “Kerry Doctrine” in his speech. And Kerry answered:
“I don’t want to use the word ‘doctrine,’ but I do think it is time for a new — I said it today — a very new calculation of how we protect our interests and balance them in the world.”
Got it — new. Actually a “very” new — what? A “calculation” of protection and “balance.”
Gourevitch recounts Kerry’s opposition to the Gulf War in 1991, when he argued it was too soon for another war:
[I]in his Senate speech against the Gulf War resolution in 1991, Kerry repeatedly invoked the failures and agonies of Vietnam, arguing that the country was not ready to sacrifice another generation to the horrors of combat.
He maintained that diplomacy could get Saddam out of Kuwait, and although he insisted that he was not a pacifist, he sure sounded like one when he read to his colleagues from the classic antiwar novel “Johnny Got His Gun.”
After the 1991 war, according to Gourevitch, Kerry “was one of many critics of the first President Bush’s abandonment of the oppressed Iraqis.” But Beinhart notes that Kerry‘s original view was that even Bush 41’s coalition was not a true coalition:
Even the 1991 Gulf war, which Kerry‘s aides now cite as a model of multilateral cooperation, struck him as suspiciously unilateral at the time. The coalition arrayed against Saddam Hussein, Kerry argued, “lacks a true United Nations collective security effort, with the full measure of international cooperation and burden-sharing.”
Gourevitch recounts that Kerry‘s position on Rwanda in 1994 precluded even an international force with no American troops:
[H]e had agreed with the Clinton Administration’s refusal in 1994 to acknowledge the genocide in Rwanda, much less approve an international intervention there, even without American troops.
Well, how about just lifting an arms embargo so people can defend themselves? Nope, according to Kerry — not if there’s a risk the French will disagree. As Beinhart notes:
In 1995, Kerry split with many Senate Democrats and voted against lifting the Bosnian arms embargo, in large part because doing so would have risked a split with Europe.
Beinhart says that Kerry‘s “greatest passion — the one that has guided his entire career” is “improving America’s relations with the world:”
Kerry‘s 1997 book, The New War, about international crime, urges “an entirely new, multilateral code of behavior.”
Hmmm. A new code of behavior. No — an entirely new code. To fight the new war.
This week the Democratic Party — which once nominated John F. Kennedy (at a time when it was a very different party) — will nominate this man for President of the United States.