Last week, I suggested that Secretary of State John Kerry might turn out to be a diplomat on the order of James Baker or George Schultz. I meant that as a compliment.
But Baker was also the statesman who airily dismissed any effort to stop the Serbian slaughter in Bosnia by saying, "We don't have a dog in that fight." Baker understood his job as promoting America's national interests -- tout court. Now, as the Obama administration steers its dainty way around the butchery in Syria, which looks more and more like the Balkan war, we need to ask whether Kerry is that Baker brand of realist -- and if so, whether we should be grateful that he is.
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Certainly he is regarded that way, both by those who welcome a dose of realism and those who don't. Sergei Lavrov, Kerry's Russian counterpart, recently praised him -- in Foreign Policy's May/June issue -- as a "pragmatic" professional, like himself. That's the kind of celebrity endorsement Kerry could probably do without. From the other side, the Middle East analyst Shadi Hamid has caustically noted that "if an alien came from outer space and was only allowed to read transcripts of Secretary Kerry's regional press conferences, it would probably have no idea that something called the ‘Arab Spring' happened."
That's only slightly hyperbolic. In a press conference with Saudi foreign minister Saud al-Faisal, Kerry actually said: "Across the Arab world, men and women have spoken out demanding their universal rights and greater opportunity.... So I want to recognize the Saudi government for appointing 30 women to the Shura Council and promoting greater economic opportunity for women." (He did add that he hoped to see "further inclusive reforms.")
American statesmen have been lavishing inane praise on the Saudis for decades now, as once they lavished praise on autocratic allies in Brazil and Greece. Nevertheless, it is a fact that Kerry has spent a great deal of time over the last 30 or so years holding quiet chats with Middle Eastern dictators and their courtiers. He is, indeed, a pragmatic professional comfortable with other professionals. He told me proudly how well he knew men like Egypt's Hosni Mubarak and Syria's Bashar al-Assad -- just before the bottom fell out on the bragging value of those relationships.
As I said last week, Kerry has plunged bravely into the most intractable diplomatic problems America faces. That's why the comparison to James Baker seems as least potentially fair. But the world has changed drastically since the last days of the Cold War. Global populations are no longer mute spectators of a statecraft practiced over their heads. The way America is seen, and not simply by elites, restrains or enables America's behavior far more than it did a generation ago.
Barack Obama is himself acutely aware of this transformation: In one of his first foreign policy speeches as a candidate, he said that when he flew low over a disaster zone or conflict area, he saw children looking back at him and wondered, "when those faces look up at an American helicopter, do they feel hope, or do they feel hate?" Perhaps the president who finds himself soft-pedaling criticism of Bahrain, an important regional ally which is crushing its own Arab Spring uprising, would say that he has found the world to be more complicated than he thought. But he was right in thinking that we do have a dog in those fights, and not just in a moral sense. That's why the war in Iraq remains a calamity for America's national interests long after the last soldier has withdrawn -- and why the president is trying yet again to close the prison at Guantanamo.
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