In an interview on Wednesday, CNN’s Jake Tapper questioned Secretary of State John Kerry about Iran, the security of the Sochi Olympics, and Syria. On the latter issue, Tapper asked the secretary point blank if the Obama administration’s Syria policy had failed:
While Kerry acknowledged that “it’s fair to say that Assad has improved his position a little bit,” he asserted that despite the fact that “diplomacy is tough, slogging, slow work and hard work,” progress was being made. In making his point about the nature of diplomacy, however, the secretary may wish in retrospect that he’d picked a different example:
But I remember talks around Vietnam, where it took Henry Kissinger a year to get the size and shape of the table decided. It took another several years before they even came to some kind of an agreement.
Efforts to establish peace talks to end the Vietnam war began in 1968 and after many delays, as Kerry said, eventually culminated in the Paris Peace Accords in 1973. But despite the Nobel Peace Prizes awarded in connection with the accords, the terms were widely ignored, and the North Vietnamese overran the south and captured Saigon in 1975. Kerry, who served in the Vietnam War, was an outspoken critic of U.S. involvement in the conflict.
Wednesday was not the first time Kerry has drawn on the history of Vietnam diplomacy in conjunction with a Mideast conflict. In early January this year, Kerry referenced his recent trip to Vietnam as a lesson of how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict may someday be resolved:
Despite Kerry’s January assertion that “history’s adversaries can actually become partners,” the acting U.S. Representative to the United Nations Human Rights Council Peter Mulrean had some rather harsh words for Vietnam, ironically on Wednesday, the same day that John Kerry was interviewed by Jake Tapper. Reuters reported Mulrean’s statements:
