Nobody had to tell Kerry that the world is complicated and intransigent; he knows that from all those years of closed-door diplomacy. But neither can I imagine Kerry saying, or thinking, "We have no dog in that fight." He is too morally driven to be that kind of realist. This is, after all, the man who first came to prominence denouncing the Vietnam War in a Senate hearing. Kerry did not absorb from the war Colin Powell's lesson that the United States should use force only massively and with a certain endgame, or Chuck Hagel's that we should do less rather than more. Kerry was prepared to see America use force to advance moral goals. He supported the NATO bombing of Bosnia in 1995, and favored a no-fly-zone in Libya before Obama came around to it.
And this is why Syria is a crucible for Kerry. Until now, Obama has made the cold-eyed judgment that America's national interest is best served by keeping a distance from Syria's civil war; he designated the regime's use of chemical weapons as a "game changer" not because it would make the violence intolerable but because it would threaten the region, and thus America's own interests. Is Kerry equally prepared to view Syria as a dreadful tar baby?
On the evidence so far, I think not. In early March -- well before the chemical weapons "red line" had been crossed -- Kerry said that the "reservations" about "who we are dealing with" in the Syrian opposition had been answered, permitting the United States to funnel non-lethal aid directly to the rebels. At the time, Martin Dempsey, the head of the Joint Chiefs, was making the opposite argument. The secretary of state then helped win an increase in assistance, and hinted that Washington might begin to supply weapons, or help others do so, if President Assad continued his onslaught. Both a State Department official and an outside expert told me that they believe Kerry is now pushing Obama to ramp up supplies to the rebels, though it's unclear if, as has been reported, that will involve weapons.
Of course, the labels don't matter if you make the wrong call. There are innumerable voices (see here, here, and here, for example) advising Obama to keep clear of Syria. If Syria is like Iraq -- a sectarian civil war just waiting to happen -- then Obama's instincts have been sound. If, on the other hand, Syria is something more like Bosnia, where an outside thumb on the scale might tip the balance far enough to force a cessation of violence, leading in turn to some kind of separation of forces and peoples, no matter how sullen and dangerous -- then we should wish that Obama had listened to figures like David Petraeus and Hillary Clinton when they argued a year ago for a more decisive American presence. And we should wish that Kerry makes, and wins, the case for actually having a dog in that fight.
That's what I wish, anyway. Since mid-2012 I have argued for a no-fly zone and military aid for the rebels. The question has become hugely complicated by the Islamization of the opposition and the increasing fragmentation of the country into semi-sovereign armed cantons; the hope that rebels might defeat Assad and rule over a unified, much less secular and democratic, state seems increasingly forlorn. Nevertheless, Assad must go; and there's no indication that will happen soon unless outsiders put their thumb on the opposition side of the scale.
So I come back to my original question about Kerry: Yes, it is fair to say that he has a legacy worldview in which gentlemen hash out the world's problems. But no, he is not the kind of realist who believes that America can do the greatest good in the world by adhering to the strictest possible definition of national self-interest -- or that "in difficult, uncertain times," as Robert Kaplan writes in his admiring article of Henry Kissinger in the current issue of The Atlantic, "the preservation of the status quo should constitute the highest morality." Kerry is something like the president he serves, uneasily perched between the wish to extricate America from the hash it has made and a romantic sense of what the country has been and can be. That is, at the very least, a good place to start.
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