Outgoing Secretary of State John Kerry accused the media of “overblow[ing]” international frustration with President Obama’s foreign policy, thereby creating an impression of American weakness on the international stage.
“Occasionally, you hear a complaint about one policy or another and I understand that,” Kerry told reporters Thursday. “I think the press actually overblows that … I think if you measure against where we were at the end of 2008 to where we are today, there is a significant amount of respect for what we have achieved and what we’ve done.”
Kerry cited the international agreement to lift economic sanctions in exchange for oversight of Iran’s nuclear deal and the United Nations climate change agreement struck in Paris as evidence of that growing respect. He made the comments in defense of his assessment, offered in an exit memo to President Obama, that U.S. alliances are stronger than ever.
“The United States is more respected in the world than we were eight years ago, in large part because we have worked hard to rebuild and strengthen our alliances all across the globe,” the exit memo says. “We also have demonstrated unprecedented leadership in strengthening and modernizing global and regional institutions to make them more capable of addressing today’s threats and challenges. Our allies and partners are force-multipliers, enabling us to make progress on multilateral issues where acting alone would not achieve our objectives.”
The memo even touts Obama’s decision to “reset our relationship [with Russia], which led to tangible benefits on nuclear arms control and supply routes for our troops in Afghanistan,” although it also acknowledges “the significant challenges to both our bilateral relationship and to international stability” posed by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intervention in Syria, invasion of Ukraine, and cyberattacks against the United States.
Kerry also confronted the greatest source of embarrassment for the Obama team, namely, the fact that the president did not follow through on his threat to attack Syrian dictator Bashar Assad in response the embattled leaders use of chemical weapons in the Syrian civil war. “The president never retracted his intent to [bomb Syria], he just got rid of the need to do it by embracing a different policy that got all [Assad’s chemical] weapons out,” Kerry said.
He admitted that the decision not to bomb Assad made Obama look like he had waffled on his decision, but argued that it was unfair to fault Obama. “So, yes, I’ve got to acknowledge, I can’t — he would acknowledge — the perception certainly is out there but I don’t think it’s fair, because I don’t it actually reflected decisions that he made and it doesn’t reflect the reality of what it is we were able to achieve.”
When a reporter invoked an array of international issues — Chinese and Russian aggression, North Korean nuclear weapons tests and “real outrage and anger and sometimes hostility from friends like Israel and the Philippines” — Kerry cited the international deals he negotiated as the benchmark of foreign policy respect.
“You can’t achieve what we’ve achieved — the [Iran nuclear] agreement, the Paris [climate] agreement — without mutual respect, without working together in an effective way to make that happen,” Kerry said.
“If you listen to people in the world — not some country that has a gripe about one particular issue or another, but people in the world — they look to the United States for the leadership that we have provided.”
