Secretary of State Kerry’s statement today in respect of the dollar has got to be one of the most absurd claims ever to issue from Foggy Bottom. Were America to walk away from the Iran deal, Reuters quotes him as saying, the dollar could “soon cease to be the world’s reserve currency.” Adds he: “If we turn around and nix the deal and then tell them, you’re going to have to obey our rules and sanctions anyway, that is a recipe, very quickly …. for the American dollar to cease to be the reserve currency of the world.” He’s arguing, in other words, for the Ayatollah Khamenei dollar.

This is just such an incredible line of argument that it’s hard to know where to begin. Doubts about the ability of America to sustain the reserve status of the dollar have been growing ever more rampant since the collapse of the greenback began during the administration of President George W. Bush. Europe has been looking for an alternative for more than a decade. Communist China, too. The International Monetary Fund covets the role for its special drawing rights. Even the United Nations has been doing the hula.

It is true that in recent years value has been flowing into a dollar that, at its nadir, had collapsed to something like a 1,900th of an ounce of gold from the 265th of an ounce of gold on which the dollar was valued when Mr. Bush acceded to the presidency. Mr. Kerry at the time was chairing the Foreign Relations Committee. The Congress of which it’s a part holds the constitutional grant of power to coin money and regulate its value. Since the Foreign Relations Committee was established in 1816, it’s hard to think of a chairman who has been more oblivious to the dollar.

It’s not that Mr. Kerry hasn’t uttered the phrase “gold standard.” He once called the American Schools of Oriental Research “literally the gold standard.” He’s said that Estonia has set “the global gold standard in cyber security.” He has called the Americans With Disabilities Act the “gold standard” in breaking down barriers to equal opportunity. A year ago he suggested that Secretary of State Baker set the “the gold standard by which modern coalition building is judged.” He’s said that Coca-Cola set the “gold standard for reporting” on human rights in Burma.

He’s for the gold standard in everything but what the gold standard was meant to be — even while bellyaching about the collapse of a dollar that the rest of the leftist world has suddenly lately been fretting is too strong. Call it a fiat foreign policy. What must the Ayatollah Khamenei think of his newfound power to upend the world’s monetary system? The truth is that we have a state secretary who has no more connection than the dollar itself to something real. Reuters referred to Mr. Kerry’s latest gambit in respect of the Iran deal “a new argument in a feverish battle to prevent lawmakers from killing it.”