THE BENCHMARKS:

Mondale on thin ice in criticizing this administration's foreign policy (Scott W. Johnson, December 21, 2003, Minneapolis Star Tribune)

Those of us who lived as adults through the four years of the Carter administration in which Walter Mondale last served as an important public official may find Mondale's statements especially strange. We recall how President Jimmy Carter proudly announced that the United States had overcome its "inordinate fear of communism," famously planted a kiss on the cheek of Leonid Brezhnev, and then reacted with shock when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.

We also recall how followers of Ayatollah Khomeni took 67 Americans hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Over the succeeding 444 days, the Carter administration tried idle threats, vain pleas and ineffectual military action to resolve the hostage crisis. Only the landslide election and subsequent inauguration of Ronald Reagan ultimately freed the hostages and ended the protracted national humiliation.

Henry Kissinger observed that the Carter administration had managed the extraordinary feat of having achieved, at one and the same time, "the worst relations with our allies, the worst relations with our adversaries, and the most serious upheavals in the developing world since the end of the Second World War."

These are the foreign policy credentials that Mondale brings to his assessment of the Bush administration. With these credentials, a reasonable person would conclude that discretion is the better part of valor and bite his tongue.

Mondale, however, seems to believe that the foreign policy of the Carter administration should serve as a benchmark against which to judge the foreign policy of other administrations.

One does feel some pity for a Party whose elder statemen are Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Bill Clinton, and Al Gore.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 21, 2003 6:27 PM