Of course, if Kerry's judgment is seen as wrong, or in any case at odds with that of the president, he's going to lose those inter-agency battles and become irrelevant. (See under: Cyrus Vance and Colin Powell). At a White House meeting earlier this month, Antony Blinken, the deputy national security advisor, warned against a conference Kerry was planning with President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Pakistan's military chief. Relations between the two countries had been in a downward spiral for months, with each bitterly accusing the other of sabotaging peace. The White House feared the meeting might make things worse. But Kerry believes, with good reason, that he has better relations with Karzai and Kayani than anyone else in the administration, and thus is uniquely positioned to fashion the exit ramp from the region that Obama is desperately seeking. At a "principals meeting" the following week, Kerry said that he felt that he could nudge the two a little closer together on political reconciliation with the Taliban. The White House signed off.
Earlier this week, the three men met in Brussels. Afterwards, only Kerry spoke, offering no hint of a breakthrough. "Frankly," he said, "we all agreed that it's better for our populations to have a sense that we're going to under-promise but deliver." That sounded like papering-over-disagreement language, in which case it would appear that Kerry had gone to the mat with the White House, only to fail. But three administration officials told me that in fact the meeting had gone well, and perhaps better than expected. Kerry had promised the White House that he would be careful to manage expectations; the goal was to restore relations between the two countries more or less to where they had been at the end of last year, when Pakistan had made some modest gestures towards supporting political talks with the Taliban. And that's more or less what Kayani promised to do in Brussels. In turn, Karzai may have pledged to tone down his truculently anti-Pakistani rhetoric.
Kerry has, in fact, been here before. Since 2009, he has talked Karzai and Kayani off a series of ledges, only to see them climb back up once he's left town. The fact that he's now secretary of state adds weight to his diplomacy, but it won't change that dynamic. The United States, Afghanistan, and Pakistan have national security interests which clash in central ways; diplomacy can not change that, though it can help leaders recognize and build on their shared interests. Kerry is genuinely good at that. We'll see how much it matters.
We are, in any case, only seeing the uppermost portions of what Kerry is hoping to build. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz recently reported that Kerry has been trying to arrange a Middle East peace summit which would bring Abbas, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Jordan's King Abdullah to Washington in June, perhaps along with Turkey and leading Arab nations. This would pose a giant risk of raised expectations and monumental disappointment, and it's hard to believe that Obama would sign off without very strong prior commitments from Israel and Palestine, and maybe also Turkey and Saudi Arabia. That's a lot of moving parts, and you can be sure that Kerry has been working the issue furiously.
I have written in the past that Kerry is a man of physical courage and intellectual caution. I have no reason to change that view. But now that he is secretary of state, what matters is whether he has what I would call diplomatic courage: the willingness to throw yourself into a negotiation whose outcome you know that you cannot control, and which may well end badly. Of course one also needs prudence, judgment, patience, and hard work; but we already know Kerry has that. Now we know as well that he is prepared to take risks, to err on the side of trying. If Obama can bring himself to trust him, Kerry just might accomplish big things.
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