White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest admitted that the U.S. “should have sent someone with a higher profile” to express solidarity with the French to an 11 January 2015 march boasting many heads of state – including Germany’s Angela Merkel, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, and the United Kingdom’s David Cameron – and an estimated 1.6 million total demonstrators. United States Secretary of State John Kerry tacitly apologized for this absence by having James Taylor perform his hit “You’ve Got a Friend” at Paris city hall on Friday 16 January 2015.

Rothkopf’s take on why the Obama administration’s handling of the Bergdahl situation was errant:

Perhaps it wasn’t necessary to basically bypass Congress — even though the law said they couldn’t. Perhaps it wasn’t necessary to suggest there was urgency due to Bergdahl’s health when there was apparently none. Perhaps it wasn’t necessary to trade all five of those really bad guys for him. Perhaps it wasn’t necessary to empower the Qataris, who have been nuzzling up to extremists to America’s detriment for years in places like Libya, Syria, and Egypt. Perhaps it wasn’t required that the country call Bergdahl a “prisoner of war” while in the hands of the Haqqani network, as it undermines the U.S. rationale for explicitly not treating its imprisoned terrorists as prisoners of war. And in any event, it certainly wasn’t necessary to do all these things at once.