Over the last two months, according to the State Department, Secretary of State John Kerry has spent 31 days traveling to 18 countries. He has spent 123 hours in the air. He has been to Turkey three times. He has met five times with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Kerry has served, in short, as a one-man diplomatic corps, a first responder to global crises. Meanwhile, the State Department limps along with hardly an assistant secretary in place.
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You could argue that Kerry has his priorities backwards. But you would be wrong.
I say this not because Kerry has succeeded on his lightning dashes around the globe. He's had at least as many reversals as breakthroughs. He (and President Barack Obama) brokered a rapprochement between Israel and Turkey -- but the deal is now threatened by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's announced plan to visit Gaza. Kerry's hopes of re-starting peace talks between Israel and Palestine hinge in part on directing private investment to Palestine; but he could not prevent Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian prime minister and key international interlocutor, from quitting. All that comes with the territory; you can't succeed or fail after two months in a job like this.
But you also can't make progress on any of these frozen crises without making a new start. Middle East peace talks, Israel-Turkey relations, negotiations with Iran -- they've all been more or less in a holding pattern since 2010. On Syria, the Obama administration has adopted a policy of no policy while its worst fears -- a sectarian civil war serving as a magnet for jihadists -- have come to pass; the Syrian regime has now provoked a crisis in the White House by apparently transgressing the President's "red line" on the use of chemical weapons. Iraq, too, is coming apart at the seams, with a Shiite government trying to crush its Sunni opponents. In his angry screed, Dispensable Nation, Vali Nasr charges that Obama has abandoned his own professed faith in diplomacy. But Kerry hasn't; and he is doing his best to renew the administration's depleted energies.
The potential danger of Kerry's one-man show is not so much that he'll ignore the home front but that he'll persuade himself that he -- and only he -- can cut the world's Gordian knots, raising expectations he cannot possibly satisfy. This is, after all, the same man who was convinced that he could make Bashar al-Assad a partner for peace. Two years ago, Kerry described Assad to me as "a serious, thoughtful, intelligent guy who has a sense of direction for the country." As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Kerry was working every angle of the Israel-Turkey-Syria relationship, hoping that if he just kept pushing he might help deliver Middle East peace. Indeed, Kerry spent the last four years believing that, with a little more persistence and calculation, a few more quiet back-channel phone calls, someone -- a certain very tall, very earnest, very well-connected someone -- could move the needle on the world's most intractable problems. Now he has the chance to show that he was right, which is why he's burst out of the gate like a half-crazed bronco.
Kerry may prove to be wrong; but as a friend of mine used to say, you can't hit if you don't swing. I asked Nicholas Burns, who after serving five secretaries of state, most recently as undersecretary to Condoleezza Rice, may be the foremost authority on the job: Has he watched Kerry's one-man show with any misgivings? The opposite, he said. He compared Kerry to the most successful recent secretaries, including James Baker and George Schultz, who worked the big issues relentlessly, personally, and several levels deep. "There is no substitute for the secretary of state in our system," as Burns put it. In the end, he says, the secretary is "negotiator-in-chief," and has to spend more time personally tending to crises than managing the department and even fighting inter-agency battles.
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