https://youtube.com/watch?v=XzdPLUj7DFw
Secretary of State John Kerry is “not involved in partisan politics” (who knew?), but he offered a glimpse of at least one likely defense of Hillary Clinton’s tenure at Foggy Bottom: She was hamstrung by George W. Bush. “Secretary of State Clinton did a terrific job of rebuilding alliances that had been shredded over the course of the prior years,” Kerry said on Sunday’s This Week.
In his 2012 reelection campaign Barack Obama managed to shoulder the Bush administration with the country’s anemic recovery: “Remember the economy we inherited,” he liked to say. Whatever validity that argument had, it certainly does not translate to foreign policy. Obama inherited wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it was his own administration’s decisions that surrendered gains made in those countries, that showed courageous protesters in Iran that the United States would not support their desire for regime change, that demonstrated to Bashar al-Assad in Syria and Vladimir Putin in Russia that American “red lines” were less rules than pleas, and (much) more.
Hillary Clinton had a concrete role in all of that, and the resulting question is a simple one: When she left office at the beginning of 2013, was the world safer than it was when George W. Bush left office in 2009? No.
If Clinton plans to blame her lackluster performance as America’s chief diplomat to the Bush administration, it will be just one more indication that, with Hillary, the buck stops anywhere but here.