How to 'feel better' about Ukraine (according to John Kerry)

I have followed John Kerry's career for 40 years, but I still cringe at things that come out of his mouth. Last Tuesday, while preparing to step down as the Biden administration's climate envoy, Kerry told journalists that people would "feel better" about Vladimir Putin's savage and bloody invasion of Ukraine if only Russia would lower its carbon-dioxide emissions.

No, seriously. He really said that. The 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers and nearly 11,000 civilians killed; the deliberate bombing of Ukrainian hospitals, schools, and apartment buildings; the corpses strewn in the streets and stuffed into mass graves in Bucha; the veiled threat to resort to nuclear war if the West keeps supporting Ukraine — Kerry is sure they would all trouble the world less if only the Kremlin put more effort into combating climate change.

"If Russia wanted to show good faith, they could go out and announce what their reductions are going to be and make a greater effort to reduce emissions," Kerry said at the Foreign Press Center in Washington. "Maybe that would open up the door for people to feel better about what Russia is choosing to do at this point in time."

In the World According to Kerry, it's only right that dictators who attack their neighbors and spill vast amounts of blood should at least be more forthcoming on carbon dioxide.

"I mean, if Russia has the ability to wage a war illegally and invade another country," he said, "they ought to be able to find the effort to be responsible on the climate issue." Just in case the obtuseness of his comments wasn't quite clear, he emphasized that Russia's "unprovoked, illegal war" has "sadly" made it impossible to be "engaged in discussions" with Moscow about the climate agenda.

Kerry's moral compass has always been awry. When Putin first unleashed his war to conquer Ukraine in 2022, Kerry told an interviewer that one of the worst things about the invasion was that "it could have a profound negative impact on the climate" by generating higher CO2 emissions and — "equally importantly" — by distracting governments from climate change. "You're going to lose people's focus," he lamented. "You're going to lose, certainly, big country attention because they will be diverted."

It would be charitable to attribute Kerry's tone-deaf comments to age. The former Massachusetts senator, secretary of state, and presidential nominee is 80 years old and perhaps doesn't grasp the impact such words are likely to have. But even in his prime, Kerry was never terribly dismayed about human rights abuses and was always sure the world's worst butchers were people he could reach an understanding with.

During his run for the White House in 2004, The Washington Post reported after interviewing him that "as president he would play down the promotion of democracy" because other issues "trumped human rights concerns in those nations." It is a longstanding pattern.

"Again and again, Kerry has shown a remarkable indulgence toward the world's thugs and totalitarians," I wrote in 2012 when he was nominated to be Barack Obama's second secretary of state.

Within months of becoming a senator in 1985, he flew to Nicaragua in a show of support for Marxist strongman Daniel Ortega, a Soviet/Cuban ally; he returned to Washington talking up the Sandinistas' "good faith." More recently Kerry earned a reputation as Bashar Assad's best friend in Congress. Against all evidence, Kerry described himself as "very, very encouraged" by the Syrian dictator's openness to reform; he repeatedly flew to Damascus to visit Assad, describing him afterward as "my dear friend" and assuring audiences that engagement was working: "Syria will move; Syria will change as it embraces a legitimate relationship with the United States." By the time Kerry finally changed his tune, thousands of Syrian protesters were dead or behind bars.

Just as Russia's scorched-earth assault on Ukraine doesn't seem to upset Kerry nearly as much as its climate record, Iran's record of fomenting horrific terrorist attacks always seemed to take second place in his mind to negotiating a nuclear weapons accord with the regime in Tehran. To achieve such a deal, he strenuously advocated lifting sanctions on Iran, even though he presumed that some of the $100 billion the ayatollahs stood to gain would go to pay for more terror. "Sure, something may go additionally somewhere," he serenely told the BBC. But he was sure it would be worth the risk.

In 2015, then-secretary of state Kerry presided over the restoration of diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba; he flew to Havana for the raising of the US flag over the new American embassy. True to form, Kerry was so eager to be ingratiating toward the island's totalitarian government that he purposely snubbed the pro-democracy dissidents who, as The Washington Post editorialized, "embody the values that the American flag represents" — human dignity, individual liberty, and the rights of free expression and assembly.

"These people — the dissidents in Cuba who have fought tirelessly for democracy and human rights, and who continue to suffer regular beatings and arrests — will not be witnesses to the flag-raising," the Post noted. "They were not invited."

When Kerry became President Biden's climate envoy, his indifference to human suffering caused by tyrants persisted. With a Bloomberg reporter in 2021, he was glad to discuss at length and with passion what China could do to reduce its reliance on coal. But then the reporter raised the matter of solar panels manufactured in China by enslaved Uighur Muslims. "What is the process," he asked, "by which one trades off climate against human rights?"

Kerry's answer, as usual, was to downplay human rights. "Life is always full of tough choices," he said cavalierly. "Yes, we have issues. … But first and foremost, this planet must be protected." He didn't mean protected from slavery and despotism. Again and again he has made his position clear: What he calls our "differences on human rights" with the world's worst dictators should not be allowed to "get in the way" of signing diplomatic deals on climate or nuclear weapons.

So when Kerry told his audience last week that the world would "feel better" about the slaughter and devastation in Ukraine if only Russia would bring its emissions down, he wasn't speaking with the wandering carelessness of an old man. He was being himself. The most brutal and murderous land war in Europe since World War II, in which tens of thousands of people have been killed? That might upset some people, but Kerry isn't among them.

Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe, from which this is reprinted with permission."