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 Speaking to reporters, Kerry inveighed against what he sees as a
tendency within the United States to retreat from the world even as
he defended the Obama administration's diplomatic efforts from Syria
to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In comments tied to the budget that U.S. President Barack Obama is
expected to present on Tuesday, Kerry suggested that tighter
spending, in part at the behest of congressional Republicans, may
limit U.S. clout around the world.
"There's a new isolationism," Kerry said during a nearly one-hour
discussion with a small group of reporters.
"We are beginning to behave like a poor nation," he added, saying
some Americans do not perceive the connection between U.S.
engagement abroad and the U.S. economy, their own jobs and wider
U.S. interests.
Kerry made the case as Obama prepares to release a budget that will
adhere to spending levels agreed to in a two-year bipartisan budget
deal struck late last year, entailing some spending cuts the
administration would have preferred to avoid.
The U.S. State Department budget will decline slightly in the
president's budget submission, Kerry said, saying this was a direct
result of the bipartisan budget deal that cut funding further than
Obama wanted.
"This is not a budget we want. It's not a budget that does what we
need," he said, saying the budget deal entailed cuts demanded by the
Republican-led House of Representatives. "It was the best the
president could get. It's not what he wanted."
In speaking of what he called the "new isolationism," Kerry cited
the limited support in the U.S. Congress to back Obama's plan to
launch an air strike against Syria last year because of its
suspected use of chemical weapons against civilians.
Obama, in a decision criticized by some U.S. allies in the Gulf and
elsewhere, asked Congress to vote on a strike. With limited
congressional backing, he ultimately abandoned a strike and pursued
a deal to get Syria to give up its chemical weapons.
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"Look at our budget. Look at our efforts to get the president's
military force decision on Syria backed up on (Capitol Hill). Look
at the House of Representatives with respect to the military and the
budget," Kerry said.
"All of those things diminish our ability to do things," he added.
Kerry took particular aim at critics of his efforts to get the
Syrian government and the opposition that has sought to oust Syrian
President Bashar al-Assad for nearly a year to reach a peace
agreement that would entail Assad's departure.
A second round of peace talks in Geneva broke up on Saturday, with
chief mediator Lakhdar Brahimi lamenting a failure to achieve much
beyond agreement on an agenda for a third round.
"These people who say that it's failed or that it's a waste of time
... Where is their sense of history?" Kerry said.
"How many years did the Vietnam talks take? How many years did
Dayton take in Bosnia-Herzegovina?" he added. "These things don't
happen in one month. I mean it's just asinine, frankly, to be making
an argument that after three weeks it's failed."
Kerry blamed the lack of a diplomatic resolution on the marked shift
in momentum on the ground to Assad's forces, backed by Iran and by
the Lebanese militant group Hizbollah, as well as on what he called
"the opposition's machinations."
"The dynamics on the ground shifted and with that shift, I believe,
came an additional ingredient ... which was the infighting of the
opposition began to divert from the focus on Assad," he said.
(Editing by Ken Wills)
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