Robert Gates, the former Secretary of Defense under George W. Bush and Barack Obama, once wrote that Joe Biden has “been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” Gates stood by that statement last year, in fact, but Biden might not be the worst the Democratic Party has to offer. Former Obama-Biden Secretary of State John Kerry, now a surrogate for Biden, managed to accidentally prophesy how Donald Trump would accomplish the impossible in the Middle East — get Arab nations to sign a separate peace with Israel without dealing with the Palestinians.
This pretty much explains why neither Biden nor Kerry should ever have been within reach of American foreign policy:
John Kerry with a 2016 Middle East take that aged like milk in a sauna. pic.twitter.com/2Vae6yDJFt
— Noam Blum (@neontaster) September 16, 2020
KERRY: There will be no separate peace between Israel and the Arab world. I want to make that very clear to all of you. I’ve heard several prominent politicians in Israel sometimes saying, “Well, the Arab world is in a different place now. We just have to reach out to them and we can work some things with the Arab world, and we’ll deal with the Palestinians.” No. No, no, and no. I can tell you that, reaffirmed even in the last week, as I have talked to leaders in the Arab community. There will be no advance and separate peace with the Arab world without the Palestinian process and Palestinian peace. Everybody needs to understand that. That is a hard reality.
It’s tough to choose what is the most embarrassing quality of this Kerry declaration from four years ago on the impossibility of what Trump has achieved. Is it his dead certainty of his own position? The way Kerry uses his cheaters to look down on the audience in his faux-professorial manner? The way he condescendingly dismisses politicians in Israel who actually turned out to be right, and to whom Kerry should have listened? It’s an abundance of riches, my friends, an abundance of riches in 44 seconds.
The biggest takeaway, though, is the realization that the biggest obstacle to normalized Israeli-Arab relations might have been the US, at least for the eight years Obama ran foreign policy. From this clip, it certainly sounds as though the Obama administration never bothered to try achieving anything like the Abraham Accord. It sounds as though Obama, Biden, and Kerry were the ones insisting that Israel deal with the Palestinians first, giving cover to the Arab nations to stick to that demand. And of course, Kerry’s making these categorical and stupendously idiotic declarations a year after the Obama administration sent pallets of cash to Iran, the nation that Arab nations fear in the region even more than they do Israel.
Had Hillary Clinton and the old establishment won the 2016 election, this never would have come to pass. And seeing just how spectacularly wrong they were, crystallized in this pompous-ass clip from that same year, should be a good argument for keeping their hands off of foreign policy for at least another four years — if not forever.
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