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John Kerry

In reply to the discussion: JK to fill in for Obama in Asia [View all]

karynnj

(60,478 posts)
3. That is pretty silly, because Kerry will not act as President
Fri Oct 4, 2013, 10:40 AM
Oct 2013

He has often been in meetings with Presidents - as has every American SoS.

In all the articles I have seen, few have any insight into how much experience Kerry has had with Asia. I suspect that we have never had a SoS with anywhere near his experience here.

He was on and at some point chaired one of the Asian sub committees of the SFRC in his first two terms as Senator.

He chaired the POW/MIA committee and negotiated the interface with Vietnam for it and, with one of his SFRC staffers worked with the Clinton administration on the restoration of relations.

He proposed the method that was successfully used by the UN to get war crimes trials in Cambodia.

Lugar spoke of how creative and helpful he was as a very young Senator when they oversaw the elections in the Philippines that ousted Marcos.

It bothers me that the pivot to Asia seemed mostly to be about the Geitner/Clinton TPP. I am not sure that it is to OUR good for this to be moved ahead. What I suspect is that the Obama administration made the decision that not enough was likely to come out of these conferences to balance the complaint that he was outside the US at a point of crisis. If they really believed that Obama's presence would make an enormous difference than I think he would still be going. (ie I think Obama would still have gone to St Petersburg - as there were HOT issues that could (and were) impacted by the that summit. )

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