There are times when I want President Barack Obama to invent a global crisis for John Kerry to solve, just to keep his secretary of state from making the real ones worse. Consider what happened at New Delhi last week, where Kerry offered a remarkable comment about the current tensions in the South China Sea. He said there was no "military solution."
Kerry was asked about China's public indifference to a decision in July from an international tribunal at the Hague that flatly rejected China's claims to the territorial waters of the Philippines in the South China Sea.
"We want to support a code of conduct for the management of the South China Sea," Kerry said. "We support diplomacy in an effort to try to resolve this with an understanding that there really is no, quote, 'military solution.' "