“The United States does not need John Kerry’s possibly illegal Shadow Diplomacy on the very badly negotiated Iran Deal,” President Donald Trump tweeted yesterday. “He was the one that created this MESS in the first place!” The president was referring, of course, to recent attempts by the former secretary of state to shore up support for the Iran nuclear deal on which the Trump administration is markedly skeptical. In recent days Kerry has met with (among others) French president Emmanuel Macron, European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini, and Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif.
We’ll leave legal scholars to debate whether Kerry’s busybody diplomacy is “illegal,” i.e.whether it violates the 1799 Logan Act barring unauthorized negotiations with foreign powers. Otherwise it’s hard to disagree with the president. Kerry, together with Barack Obama, is chiefly responsible for what was in our view a grossly misguided agreement with one of the world’s foremost sponsors of terrorism. The 2015 agreement enriched the Iranian regime in exchange for vain promises not to pursue its nuclear weapons program, all while turning a blind eye to Iran’s malevolent behavior throughout the Middle East and beyond.
But leave aside the merits or demerits of the Iran deal. The point is: John Kerry is no longer secretary of state. The Constitution confers authority on the Trump administration to negotiate on behalf of the United States. There’s no role to play for Obama-era retirees vainly groping for media attention.
Many of Kerry’s defenders in the media compare his latest diplomatic efforts to those of Sen. Tom Cotton and then-Rep. Mike Pompeo three years ago. In 2015, Cotton and Pompeo met with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in an attempt to obtain details on the Iran deal. The comparison is absurd. The Iran nuclear agreement contained some stipulations known only to Iran and the IAEA. Neither Congress nor the agreement’s co-signatories were aware of some parts of the deal having to do with nuclear inspections. Cotton and Pompeo merely insisted that all the agreement’s details be disclosed to Congress. (In any case, the parties had already reached an agreement by the time Cotton and Pompeo met with IAEA officials.) Kerry, by sharp contrast, is consulting with foreign powers for the purpose of counteracting the sitting president’s policy on Iran.
This is hardly the first time Democratic grandees—including Kerry himself—have pretended to be secretaries of state when the incumbent administration had rejected their policy views. In 1985, Kerry and then-Sen. Tom Harkin traveled to Managua to meet with Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega in an explicit attempt to undermine the Reagan administration’s policy of aiding anti-communist Sandinistas. Former senator Chris Dodd and House member Peter Kostmayer, among others, were fond of sending letters to Ortega apologizing for Reagan administration policy.
Former president Jimmy Carter is still the most famous and aggressive shadow diplomat in the United States. He has inserted himself into U.S. foreign relations, uninvited, time and again since leaving office in 1981. In 2003 he met with the Japanese in order to undermine Bush administration policy on North Korea; in 1986 he met with Ortega regime officials in opposition to Reagan administration policy; and in the Middle east he has been a constant adversary to Republican administrations. One might also consider Ted Kennedy’s offer to coach Soviet officials on nuclear disarmament and to orchestrate favorable American media coverage of a (never realized) visit by Soviet premier Yuri Andropov.
In their hearts, left-liberal politicos like Kerry, Kennedy, Dodd, and Carter can’t abide the idea that somebody else is in charge. They enjoy the trappings of office, and they like to pretend they hold office even when they don’t. We will stop well short of calling it traitorous. Instead we’ll call it arrogant and malign.
