While there is the usual grumbling about John Kerry being made Secretary of State, I think it is a splendid position for him. Who better to stand cooling his heels in the anterooms of defiant tin-pot despots? Who better to feel first-hand the immediate effects of waning American influence?
By now it should be very clear that this administration views foreign policy as a distraction from their business of reshaping the republic. It is simply not a priority.
That is why Hillary! was chosen to lead the State Department - it placated her base and kept her out of the way. In this respect the Obama administration is similar to the "spendid isolationism" of Great Britain when the Foreign Office was more of an exile than a prestigious appointment.
Kerry will reliably follow Obama and his nomination will sail through the Senate. Partisan Republicans like getting him out of the upper chamber and are relishing the thought of an open seat they can pick up via a Scott Brown comeback.
None of this has anything to do with Kerry's actual qualifications, but like Hillary!s, these are irrelevant. Otto von Bismarck would be unable to salvage the US strategic position under this White House. What is coming will come.
The White House knows the press will do its part to cover things up. Any bad news abroad can be buried on page A24 or given a 30-second cursory tidbit on the nightly news - assuming it gets mentioned at all.
As we saw in the 1990s, bombing barracks, embassies and warships are insufficient to generate much public interest if the press covers them up.
At the risk of sounding like a Leninist, the storm is coming, and Kerry is the perfect person to be associated with it.
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