Free Republic

U.S. Secretary of State’s John Kerry’s closing memo to President Barack Obama painted a rosy picture of the U.S. role in the world since Obama took office in 2008. Kerry claimed Obama made the best of a bad situation, citing Obama’s inheritance of wars not his own in Iraq and Afghanistan, in addition to a grave economic crisis. Talking points seeking to validate Obama’s supposed success by blaming the past are a frequent and familiar direction for the Obama administration. “The United States is more secure, more respected, and more engaged in the world,” the glowing memo states, adding that,...

Secretary of State John Kerry doubled down on the controversial Iran nuclear deal Tuesday, telling lawmakers that there was not a better deal available to negotiators and that since 2003 Iran has not pursued a nuclear bomb to the best of America’s knowledge. Speaking in a moderated discussion on the nuclear deal reached with Iran hosted by Thomson Reuters in New York, Kerry tried to counter Republican claims that a better deal can be reached. Kerry told the forum that President George W. Bush tried in 2003 and 2008 to get a better deal, but there “is not a better...

US Secretary of State John Kerry has claimed the nuclear deal signed with Iran is “as pro-Israel as it gets,” and claims he “doesn’t know” if the Iranian leadership is serious about destroying the State of Israel. The comments were made in an in-depth interview with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, which was published Wednesday following intense lobbying for and against the deal as it heads to a fateful vote in Congress. Kerry warned Goldberg that if Congress voted down the agreement, it would “be the ultimate screwing” of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. “The ayatollah constantly believed that we are...

As we learn more about the Iran deal — the side agreements, the lifting of the arms and missile embargoes, the loophole-ridden inspections regime — the more apparent it is that only people so enamored of their own work, so gullible to embrace the Iranians’ soothing words and so desperate for glory could have negotiated this deal. Rather than acknowledge the criticisms on the merits, the administration sinks lower and lower, casting aspersions on critics. When Secretary of State John Kerry announces that the world will blame Israel if the deal fails, we have left the realm of dignified debate....

Kerry's duplicity was both blatant and breathtaking.

During Thursday’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the Iran nuclear agreement, Secretary of State John Kerry said the goal of the negotiations was never to dismantle Iran’s entire nuclear program but rather to prevent them from obtaining nuclear weapons, despite saying in 2013 the “whole point” of sanctions was to get Iran to “dismantle its nuclear program.”

In an editorial for the new issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Bill Kristol notes the "ludicrous" "guarantee" Secretary of State John Kerry made last week regarding Iran's so-called breakout capacity towards nuclear weapons. Kerry told Israelis: I say to every Israeli that today we have the ability to stop [the Iranians] if they decided to move quickly to a bomb and I absolutely guarantee that in the future we will have the ability to know what they are doing so that we can still stop them if they decided to move to a bomb. This is not the first time Kerry has...

The United States plans to continue its efforts to pursue a nuclear deal with Iran, but will not allow Tehran to run amok and do as it pleases, said Secretary of State John Kerry. If needed, the US will respond forcefully to Iranian efforts to destabilize the Middle East, Kerry said in an interview. "Iran needs to recognize that the United States is not going to stand by while the region is destabilized or while people engage in overt warfare across lines - international boundaries - in other countries,” Kerry told PBS in an interview Wednesday. The US is “well...

Secretary of State John Kerry on Friday called for "ambitious, concrete action" to combat climate change after a government agency released new data about global temperatures. "What’s surprising is that anyone is surprised that 2014 was the hottest year on record. The science has been screaming at us for a long, long time," Kerry said Friday in a statement released by the State Department. Kerry said historic temperatures, greenhouse gas emissions and extreme weathers events like torrential rain and droughts "are having devastating economic, security and health impacts across the planet." His comments were in response to a new report...

Several places in the treaty text, including Article 5, require all countries to “establish and maintain a national control system, including a national control list.” Moreover, it declares, “Each State Party is encouraged to apply the provisions of this Treaty to the broadest range of conventional arms.” Article 5, Section 4 says each State Party “shall provide its national control list to the Secretariat, which shall make it available to other States Parties.” Which means our federal government will provide the guns and ammo registration list to the UN, which will provide it to Russia, China, Cuba — any and...

The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), the terror organization behind the Palestinian Authority (PA), called for a comprehensive strategy against Islamic extremism on Saturday - by blaming Israel for rising radicalization a la' the remarks of US Secretary of State John Kerry. Kerry insisted on Friday that the failure of peace talks between Israel and the PA - not Western apathy to Islamism nor the US's failures to resolve tensions in Iraq - was the culprit for the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS) group, sparking outrage from Israeli officials. "There wasn't a leader I met... who didn't raise with me...

Secretary of State John Kerry didn’t appear before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to lay out an offensive strategy for defeating ISIS. Instead his real mission was a defensive strategy to protect Obama from critics on the right and the left. Obama’s delayed strategy hasn’t won over liberals and conservatives. It certainly hasn’t won over the American people. For the first time, Obama’s counterterrorism policy no longer has the support of a majority of Americans. Americans don’t believe that Obama can keep them safe. They suspect that he’s just trying to protect the last shreds of his fading popularity by...

A collection of photographs that Ukraine says shows the presence of Russian forces in the eastern part of the country, and which the United States cited as evidence of Russian involvement, has come under scrutiny. The photographs were submitted by Ukraine last week to the Organization for Security and Cooperation, an organization in Vienna that has been monitoring the situation in Ukraine. Some of the photographs were also provided by American officials to Secretary of State John Kerry so he could show them when he met in Geneva last Thursday with his counterparts from the European Union, Russia, and Ukraine....

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Monday reaffirmed America’s friendship with Israel and its commitment to the Jewish state’s security. Kerry, who spoke at the AIPAC conference in Washington, said that his peace efforts were “not about him” but were about the “dreams of Israelis” and the “dignity of Palestinians.” “People ask me why am I so committed to these negotiations and why am I convinced that peace is possible,” he said, adding, that it was wrong to ask him why he visits the region so much. “This isn’t about me,” said Kerry, adding that his peace efforts were...

United States Secretary of State John Kerry has triggered an uproar in Israel yet again with remarks to the foreign press, this time for a claim that no Israelis were murdered by Palestinian terrorists in 2013. […] In fact, several Israelis were murdered in terrorist attacks in Judea and Samaria in 2013. The widow of one of them—31-year-old Evyatar Borovsky—expressed hurt at Kerry’s remarks. […] “The Americans are supposed to be our best friends, but are actually working against us and putting our backs to the wall,” she accused. Kerry is “living on a planet of his own,” she said....

Just as computer technology greatly expanded Americans' wealth in the 1990s, the clean energy market could do the same thing in the years ahead, Secretary of State John Kerry told the Munich Security Conference in Germany on Saturday. He touted climate change as a societal challenge and an economic opportunity: ... "The energy market that we are staring at--that is the solution to the climate change," Kerry continued. "Energy policy is the solution to climate change. That market, my friends, is a $6-trillion market today with 4 to 5 billion users today, and it will grow to some 9 billion...

The Washington Free Beacon reports. I have no idea whom to believe. Iran and Western nations including the United States came to an agreement on the framework for an interim deal late Saturday night in Geneva. The deal has yet to be implemented The White House released a multi-page fact sheet containing details of the draft agreement shortly after the deal was announced. However, Iranian foreign ministry official on Tuesday rejected the White House’s version of the deal as “invalid” and accused Washington of releasing a factually inaccurate primer that misleads the American public.

After strike deal on Syria, Kerry says him calling it impossible was 'diplomacy' Published September 14, 2013 FoxNews.com Secretary of State John Kerry said Saturday, after reaching a tentative agreement with Russia to disarm Syria of chemical weapons, that his earlier statement about the impossibility of such a plan was in fact “the language of diplomacy.” “I purposefully made the statements,” Kerry said in Geneva, Switzerland, after reaching the framework of an agreement with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. “And I did indeed say it was impossible and [Syrian President Bashar al-Assad] won't do it, even as I hoped it...

The swiftness with which attention is now being focused on collecting and destroying chemical weapons located in Syria has been truly breathtaking. Last Friday 6 September President Obama was waving a joint declaration signed by Australia, Canada, France, Italy, Japan, Republic of Korea, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States of America at the G20 Summit in St Petersburg -- in which there was not one mention of the need to collect and destroy those chemical weapons. That same day President Obama in his press conference in St. Petersburg was dismissive of a similar proposal suggested...

Obama is going on a whirlwind media blitz this week in an attempt to sell a very skeptical public on war with Syria. Yet the Washington Post notes: Obama’s top aide says the administration lacks “irrefutable, beyond-a-reasonable-doubt evidence” that skeptical Americans, including lawmakers who will start voting on military action this week, are seeking. Indeed, those who have seen the evidence say that it is incredibly weak. German intelligence also says that Assad didn’t order the attacks. Moreover, President Obama correctly noted in 2007: The President does not have the power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack...