Secret of John Kerry's 'success' is irrational optimism

If you've ever wondered how Secretary of State John Kerry's understands diplomacy, the waiting is over. On Thursday, at the Aspen Institute's Washington Ideas Forum, Steve Clemons of the Atlantic pried it out of America's top diplomat: What exactly is the "John Kerry secret sauce?"

There are interests and values, Kerry told the audience. "You may have tension with the values because of the level of the interest, or the values may be -- I mean, the Holocaust or Rwanda -- which is also relevant to the debate about Syria, by the way, the killings and the torture and the barrel bombs and the gas."

But then we got that secret sauce. After you figure out those values and interests, "you have to figure out whether you can find in the adversaries a meeting of the minds on any of the interests and/or values," he said. "And that mixes differently with different people at different times."

First, let's state off the bat that what Kerry said is like a football coach saying, "We just want to go out there and try to put more points on the board than the other guys." Everyone knows that states have values and interests, and that diplomacy demands an assessment of whether one's adversaries share any of those interests or values.

Kerry's weakness is that he never gets to the point where he concludes an adversary doesn't share our interests and values. He just keeps engaging. Take Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Even after the horror of the last week, when the Russians and Syrians bombed an aid convoy that sought to deliver food and medicine to the besieged city of Aleppo, Kerry can't quite end the talks. "I think we're on the verge of suspending the discussion," he said. The verge!

Then there is the stubborn fact that it's difficult to find places in the world where the U.S. has advanced its interests or values in the last four years. Kerry spent a year and a half on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, with no results. In 2013, after making the case to Congress that Bashar al-Assad's gassing of civilians in Syria was an atrocity akin to the Nazis, he negotiated a deal to remove those chemical weapons that nonetheless allowed the regime to continue to drop barrel bombs of chlorine.

In the South China Sea, China builds artificial islands and militarizes them. In Europe, Russia has annexed Crimea. Iraq is still trying to build a political consensus to cleave its Sunni citizens away from the Islamic State. The Afghan government is losing territory to the Taliban.

Clemons acknowledged all of this in a broad sense when he asked Kerry about the perception that the world is beginning to doubt America's staying power. "I hear this and I hear people allege that the United States is retrenching and that we're somehow pulling back," Kerry said. But he assured that this wasn't true: "I think if you measure all of American history, there has never been a moment where the United States is more engaged in more places simultaneously on as significant a number of complicated issues as we are today."

Notice that Kerry is not touting how America is advancing its values or interests. Rather, he's making the unremarkable claim that the U.S. is engaged in lots of global crises all at once. I hope the committee awards him the Nobel Prize for Participation.

Then Kerry ticked off a bunch of places where he thinks U.S. diplomacy has succeeded. This includes Afghanistan, which is a success because the government in Kabul hasn't totally collapsed: "It's complicated, difficult, but we've been able to sustain the effort in Afghanistan."

U.S. diplomacy in the South China Sea counts as success because "we've held that from becoming a major conflict." In Ukraine, "the sanctions worked." In Yemen, "we're on the verge maybe of a ceasefire there." In Libya, a failed state and safe haven for a wide swath of fanatics, "We're able to try to grow the capacity, the sustainability of that government. It's very tricky. It's tribal. It's complicated. There are extremists there."

In fairness to Kerry, he also mentioned the fact that relief efforts saved perhaps a million lives from Ebola, and that many African children are now growing up without the scourge of AIDS. On the latter, he did not mention a few major factors: much cheaper AIDS medication has come on the market, and Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush, invested billions in trying to address the problem.

If this overview counts as success, I would hate to see failure. But you have to credit Kerry for never becoming embittered or discouraged. This brings us to Kerry's most consequential diplomacy: the Iran nuclear deal.

Kerry explained that for now, the pact has held. He said that he had personally met with banks to try to assuage their fears about doing business with Iran, but the Iranians are still worried they have not seen more benefits. There's also a tension between the moderates and the hardliners in Tehran, a line we hear from Kerry all the time. "It will remain complicated," he said.

When asked if he was proud of the Iran deal, Kerry demurred. There was a time when Obama's pride about the Iran deal verged on gloating. Today, Kerry understands that he negotiated a deal with an Iranian leader who can't or won't end his country's hostility toward the U.S. and its allies. This is a problem, because most of the limits on nuclear fuel production are lifted in the next 9 to 14 years.

That's when we'll find out whether this bargain advanced America's interests and values.

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Eli Lake is a Bloomberg View columnist who writes about politics and foreign affairs. He was previously the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast. Lake also covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI, and was a contributing editor at the New Republic.

Previously:
• 10/28/16: Trump Scored a point as Clinton Stumbled on Iran
• 09/26/16: Obama kept military out of the loop on Iran payments
• 09/21/16: Preparing for North Korea's inevitable collapse
• 09/20/16: Why this neocon spy chief has joined Team Trump
• 09/12/16: U.S. spies think China wants to read your email
• 09/05/16: Kerry's soft words blunt U.S. hard power at sea
• 09/01/16: China's 'little green boats' have Japan on alert
• 08/31/16: Obama's CIA director wants to stick around for Clinton
• 08/29/16: Here's what Kerry should do to divide Iran and Russia
• 08/17/16: U.S. special ops in Syria are told, 'Don't get shot'
• 08/10/16: Why #NeverTrump movement is also #NeverGaryJohnson
• 08/04/16: Why Russia keeps getting away with hacking the U.S.
• 07/19/16: When clues nearly led the FBI to America's favorite Saudi
• 07/12/16: General Flynn outlines an all-out war on terror
• 07/11/16: The Palestinian incentive program for killing Jews
• 06/28/16: Obama's Iran policy is at odds with Hillary's message
• 06/22/16: Is Israel a pariah? Not according to its powerful new friends
• 06/10/16: U.S. taxpayers are funding Iran's military expansion
• 06/08/16: It's for good reason that aiding Kurds in and around Iraq is among the only bipartisan goals on America's foreign policy agenda
• 06/07/16: Why the U.S. Needs Russian Rocket Engines to Spy on Russia
• 06/06/16: Hillary Targets the 'Blame America First' Republicans
• 06/02/16: Hollywood and Korean pop could bring down Kim Jong-Un
• 05/25/16: REVEALED: The secret history of the Iran-deal 'echo chamber'
• 04/27/16: Pakistan has a China connection to nuclear trouble
• 04/19/16: Obama still not finished reinvigorating Iran
• 04/08/16: 'Panama Papers' could help go after Assad's wealth
• 04/05/16: Fascist or con man: The duelling Trump narratives
• 03/23/16: Hillary's convenient evolution on Israel
• 03/21/16: Cruz assembles an unlikely team of foreign-policy rivals
• 03/07/16: Trump turns out to be a politician, and not a good one
• 02/17/16: As Obama urges Congress, military says it can't send Gitmo detainees to U.S.
• 02/06/16: Hillary's security clearance is under scrutiny
• 12/23/15: Iran deal restricts U.S. more than Congress knew
• 12/11/15: Iranian troops abandoning Assad, Western officials say
• 12/09/15: Obama team weighs cyberwar options on Islamic State
• 11/20/15: After the Paris attacks, Bush whiffs on his war speech
• 11/18/15: What Obama's incoherence and anger at post-Paris press conference reveals
• 11/17/15: Dems begin to embrace 'regime change' --- again
• 11/13/15: Hurt feelings, unsafe spaces and other Israeli crimes
• 11/09/15: Egyptian leader seen as target of jihad
• 11/04/15: How Ahmad Chalabi survived his war to free Iraq
• 10/26/15: Now we know: AIPAC and the Dems who supported Iran deal
• 10/21/15: GOPers at Hilary hearing taking cues from Dems?