How to Not Make Allies and Influence People

Secretary of State John Kerry is concerned about the tone:

Kerry said that everywhere he goes, every leader he meets asks about what is happening in America.

“They cannot believe it. I think it is fair to say that they’re shocked. They don’t know where it’s taking the United States of America,” Kerry said in an interview on the Sunday CBS news show “Face The Nation.”

“It upsets people’s sense of equilibrium about our steadiness, about our reliability, and to some degree I must say to you, some of the questions, the way they’re posed to me, it’s clear to me that what’s happening is an embarrassment to our country.”

And he’s not talking about the Democratic side of the contest:

Kerry was asked out the impact abroad of the Republican campaign with its calls for bans on Muslim immigrants, surveillance of Muslim neighborhoods and the return of waterboarding, an interrogation practice regarded as torture.

He might have been asked about other things, too, like promises to “bomb the shit” out of Arabs, assassinate family members of suspected terrorists, turn the whole region into glowing radioactive glass, and so on.

That’s gotta be awkward when you’re sitting down with the King of Jordan or some Emir in the Gulf States.

On the other hand, if you’re a recruiter from ISIS and you’re making a pitch that America is out to get Muslims and needs to get smacked with a few good-sized suicide attacks, well, that stuff is pure gold.

So, I think this is quite a bit more serious than just being some kind of inconvenient embarrassment.

Author: BooMan

Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.