Team Obama is shameful for attacking the great Henry Kissinger after the administration’s epic foreign policy failures.

A favorite phrase of the late Charles Krauthammer comes to mind: “moral grooming.”

That perfectly describes Ben Rhodes’ embarrassing article about Henry Kissinger published by The New York Times.

Calling a brilliant 100-year-old man who faithfully served America for decades after his death a “hypocrite” and accusing him of being obsessed with power is pretty disgusting, but Rhodes doesn’t have the decency to stop there.

He compounds the insults with his foolish insistence that the Obama administration, in which he served, pursued far more ethical policies than Kissinger and was therefore more faithful to American ideals.

Oh please, this isn’t even close.

Rhodes’ version is true only if you view the Constitution as a suicide pact, which is more or less what Barack Obama’s foreign policies amounted to.

Rhodes, a Manhattan boy, a failed novelist and a young speechwriter, was inexplicably elevated to deputy national security adviser by Obama when he was in his early 30s. The litmus test was his total adherence to the belief that Obama would redeem America from his sins.

From the way he heaps praise on his boss, Rhodes must really believe that Obama deserved the Nobel Peace Prize he received months after his election, even though it was the equivalent of a participation trophy.

Instead of results, the Obama White House offered virtue signaling and a promise to steer America away from addiction to intolerance and ignorance. As Obama said when working-class voters in Pennsylvania failed to see him as their savior, that meant they “clung to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.”

The politics came together for Obama, but the policies never did. Instead, his ignorant view of history and power produced a series of failures of enormous consequence.

Just as Rhodes’s arrogance prevents him from appreciating the importance of Kissinger’s achievements, such as the arms control agreements with the Soviet Union and the opening to China, it also blinds him to the disasters created by Obama’s dreamy “Kumbaya” approach. .

As just one example, the United States, Israel and much of the Middle East are still living with Obama’s deadly mistake of trying to bribe Iran to be a good neighbor.

A less arrogant president might have paid attention to the question of whether Iran saw itself as a cause or a country.

Kissinger asked that question in 2008, but Obama and others never understood the distinction and waded into waters far over their heads.

Enable Iran

His policies helped Iran become a terrorist superpower, with Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis enjoying the Islamist agenda and the billions of dollars that filled their coffers. The money poured in because Obama eased sanctions on Iranian oil, a mistake continued by Joe Biden.

However, mirroring Obama’s distaste for Israel, Rhodes is also criticizing Biden for supporting the Jewish state in its war against Hamas.

More broadly, eight years of Obama’s foreign policy, combined with Biden’s mini-me version for the last three, have brought the world to the brink of global conflict.

If this is a success for Rhodes, what would failure be like?

He conveniently makes no mention of Obama’s aborted “red line” threats in Syria, no doubt because tens of thousands died when Obama lost his nerve after Syrian President Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons.

A comparison with Russia is also revealing. Kissinger, after getting President Richard Nixon to resupply Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War and negotiating the peace agreement with the Arabs, persuaded Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to move away from the Soviet Union and toward the United States. Joined.

Kissinger called Egypt’s move to the American column one of his most important achievements.

But under Obama, Russia invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea. He became an ally of Assad and Hezbollah during the Syrian civil war, gaining a significant presence in the Middle East for the first time in 50 years.

In Egypt, Obama helped topple President Hosni Mubarak during the brief Arab Spring and demanded its leaders accept the Muslim Brotherhood, ending with the Islamist group gaining power before being overthrown in a coup.

Rhodes played a major role in the administration’s biggest failures. He is credited with writing Obama’s 2009 speech in Cairo, which laid out Obama’s grandiose vision for himself.

“I consider it part of my responsibility as president of the United States to fight negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear,” he declared.

Forgetting patriotism

Later, as the failures piled up, I wrote that Obama forgot to pack his patriotism for his foreign trips and that “the president of the United States cannot be an intermediary between his countrymen and a foreign enemy who has declared war on us.” .

Rhodes also helped Obama restore relations with Cuba, another virtue that indicates a failure that brought no benefit to the United States or ordinary Cubans.

Rhodes’ most notorious role was misleading the media about the details of talks with Iran over a nuclear deal. He boasted of using inexperienced journalists to create an “echo chamber” that helped sway public opinion in favor of the deal.

Rhodes called this tactic creating a “narrative” and blames Kissinger for not adequately telling America’s “story” to the world.

Look, it’s about the narrative, not the results.

None of this suggests that Kissinger’s record is impeccable. He and Nixon inherited the Vietnam War, and although he shared the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the agreements that led to our withdrawal, it has been firmly established that he could have ended the war sooner. And the secret war in Cambodia caused a bloodbath.

He also helped engineer the 1973 military coup that deposed Chile’s elected president and led to 17 years of dictatorship.

Kissinger, like almost the entire foreign policy establishment of both parties, viewed the Soviet Union as a permanent fixture that could only be contained. Fortunately, Ronald Reagan hated that view and described his view of the Cold War as “We win, they lose.”

Three years after Reagan left power, the Soviet system collapsed.

Still, Kissinger remained at the top for eight important years under Nixon and Gerald Ford, serving first as national security adviser, then as secretary of state, and sometimes both at once.

Gallup found him to be the most admired man in America in 1972 and 1973. He was also an unlikely bachelor in town, and the AP reports that in a poll of Playboy Club bunnies, he finished first as “the man whom “I would like to know more.” have a date with “.

Kissinger’s response: “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”

Historian Robert Dallek cited as Kissinger’s most important achievement the effort to create “a set of conditions that could reduce the prospect of nuclear war.”

Kissinger was not a modest man, but his belief in realpolitik wisely recognized the limits of ideological activities.

“I try to understand, without pessimism or optimism, the world I find myself in,” he told the Times in 2011.

If Obama had understood this, the world today would be a safer place.