As secretary of state, John Kerry shrugged his shoulders as Syrian President Bashar Assad slaughtered hundreds of thousands of civilians. As President Joe Biden’s climate envoy, his legacy has become worse.
Put aside the hypocrisy: “It’s the only choice for somebody like me,” he said when asked about his use of a private jet to collect an award for activism in Iceland in 2019. That hypocrisy has continued during Kerry’s current tenure. He jets around the globe to have conversations he could have as productively had via a video call. But what will define Kerry’s legacy and, by extension, Biden’s, is Kerry’s willingness to make moral compromises for the sake of an autocrat’s ephemeral though unenforceable promises.
At issue is communist China’s Uyghur genocide. Admittedly, genocide is a word now overused among diplomats and activists. But when it comes to China, the word is apt. President Xi Jinping has constructed an infrastructure of genocide which includes concentration camps, reeducation centers, transfers of population, slave labor, forced sterilization, sexual violence, and torture. Worse may occur. Beijing prevents journalists and independent assessors from reaching Uyghur centers or inspecting camps. While many other regimes — Serbia’s, Burma’s, Ethiopia’s, for example, have encouraged mass murder against ethnic groups — China’s leaders take comfort in prior success. Without international consequence, they overran and systematically dismantled Tibet’s independence and erased its indigenous culture, except for isolated sites which Han Chinese transformed into museums that sanitize the tragedy.
While China’s leaders have built their infrastructure of genocide, they have found no better ally than Kerry. Behind the scenes, Kerry has lobbied against restrictions on goods from China manufactured by slave labor. For Kerry, such humanitarian concerns are worth sacrificing upon the altar of climate negotiations, never mind the science and models Kerry cites have a poor track record of accuracy.
For Kerry (and Biden) to deny and dismiss China’s machinery of evil simply plays into the hands of China’s autocratic leaders. They consider Kerry naive, see Biden as senile, and generally look down upon both Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan.
If Kerry truly cares about environmentalism, then his policy prescriptions are exactly backward. Whether in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, or Mikhail Gorbachev; Romania under Nicolae Ceausescu; Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdogan; or Iran under the Islamic Republic, or China under the Chinese Communist Party, the environment fares poorly under dictators. The reason is simple: autocratic regimes lack accountability; they can pollute with abandon. They can lie, often without consequence.
Kerry may believe himself sophisticated for greenlighting genocide for the greater good of environmental agreements. History will remember a naive man who traded morality for the empty promises of a brutal regime.
Michael Rubin (@mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
