It is fair to wonder whether anything John Kerry says actually influences Biden administration policy. Kerry may well be doing the job that President Biden wants him to do, which is to fly on his private jet to climate change summits and conferences around the world, and to talk about how much Biden and the administration care about climate change.
Kerry can shrug off China’s use of slave labor, share a laugh and handshakes with Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, praise Vladimir Putin as “very forthcoming and thoughtful” about ways to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions,” and his deputies can attend events sponsored by the Chinese Communist Party. No matter how brutal, ruthless, or anti-American a dictator you are, if you murmur the right happy talk about climate change, Kerry will appear, shake your hand, smile during the photo op, and tell reporters how helpful, thoughtful, and sophisticated and nuanced you are. No word on whether any recent dictators have gotten to enjoy a full dinner with Kerry, as Syrian dictator Bashir Assad did in 2013.
But someone in the administration really ought to ask themselves if Kerry is helping them achieve their objectives when he goes around the country making statements like this:
“We have to work with China, we have to work with India,” Kerry said during an interview Friday at Yahoo News’ New York offices. “We even have to find a way, ultimately, if we can resolve the war in Ukraine, to work with Russia, because Russia is a huge emitter. And any one of these countries has an ability — if it doesn’t move to change its energy base — to make it much harder for the rest of the world, if not impossible, to reach the goals we’ve set.”
“If we can resolve the war in Ukraine” – well, that’s a really big “if” there, senator. Kerry continued:
“What is happening in Ukraine is an abomination,” he said. “It is a violation of everything we have worked to achieve since World War II, where we put in place rule of law, international law. … So this is an important fight, but it’s not an exclusive fight. We also have to deal with climate at the same time.”
As discussed in today’s Morning Jolt, Putin has announced a move that would violate the international Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and Russia has already broken the extension of the START Treaty. Why on earth would anyone think that a Russian regime that is breaking its treaties left and right is going to start honoring its treaties agreeing to reduce carbon emissions? As the late great historian Paul Johnson wrote, the only thing that guarantees the honoring of a treaty is the potential consequences for violating it, including the threat of military force. You could argue that one of the reasons the world faces the mess it is in is because it put too much faith in treaties and agreements that had too little enforcement. In the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, Ukraine gave up the remaining nuclear weapons it had from the Soviet Union in exchange for Russia promising it would respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity and inviolability of its borders, and to refrain from the use or threat of military force. Oh, well.
Kerry has interpreted his mandate to work with any regime on earth on climate change, no matter how much that regime is opposing the U.S. in other matters. It is an absurd contradiction that hostile regimes enjoy exploiting, playing on the naivete and ego of a former secretary of state who probably can’t believe that his old blathering Senate colleague is now sitting in the Oval Office.