Article on Sec. Kerry in National Journal

[MBS]

good photo, too (sorry, couldn't seem to post it here-- go to url below)
http://www.nationaljournal.com/white-house/john-kerry-a-diplomatic-one-man-band-20131011

"The big Kerry arm." That's how some of his Senate staff used to describe John Kerry's approach to negotiation. It's reminiscent of what Lyndon Baines Johnson used to do to his Senate colleagues: a little light physical pressure to drive home a point. The six-foot-four Kerry, who landed in Kabul on an unannounced visit Friday, is no doubt even now applying that big arm to the shoulders of the diminutive Hamid Karzai, the often combative and erratic president of Afghanistan, whom Kerry knows well and with whom no one else in the U.S. government seems able to deal. And if Kerry's recent record is any indication, he'll get some results.

Call him the un-Hillary. Unlike his predecessor, Hillary Rodham Clinton, John Kerry has always relished direct mediation in the world's trouble spots—and the more troubled, the better, aides say. Whereas Clinton, perhaps with an eye to the 2016 presidential race, appeared reluctant to personally take charge of especially hard issues ranging from Mideast peace to a Syrian truce, Kerry has jumped in eagerly. "Every single time a tough problem has fallen into John Kerry's lap, he's gone into it believing that it could be solved, and he of all people could solve it," says a senior administration official. Kerry, the failed 2004 Democratic nominee for president and the son of a career diplomat, is also said to be determined to leave behind his mark as a great secretary of State now that he no longer has political ambitions. . . Is Kerry, only nine months on the job, already proving to be a better secretary of State than Hillary Clinton? To be fair to Clinton, she delegated Afghanistan and Pakistan to Holbrooke, one of America's most able diplomats, and the Middle East to George Mitchell, the former U.S. senator. She also became secretary of State at a rawer time for America, when the key task of the new Obama administration was to restore some luster to a U.S. image badly tarnished by the ongoing Iraq war and the global financial crisis triggered by Wall Street. As a result, the administration was then focused on emphasizing the "soft" diplomacy of U.S. image-building, values-promotion and influence over "hard" or coercive diplomacy, in other words personal mediation in conflicts.

But neither did Clinton seem eager to step in when Holbrooke and Mitchell or other special envoys failed to make headway. It's also clear that Kerry's efforts are largely of his own making—especially in the Mideast, where the White House appears to have somewhat reluctantly let him try, marginalizing previous efforts to "pivot" its interests to Asia. And to a striking degree, Kerry's efforts to bring Israelis and Palestinian together, to negotiate a truce in Syria at a "Geneva II" conference, and to find common ground with Iran on its nuclear program are all pieces of the same puzzle. Iran, for example, will continue to shore up Syria's Assad and Hezbollah as long as it fears military threats from Israel and the United States over its nuclear program. If those threats abate, and some kind of nuclear agreement is signed, it might just be possible for Kerry to also induce Tehran to separate itself from the Assad regime, thereby making a truce in the civil war easier. A similar logic applies to Russia, which has also backed Assad and often seen itself as an adversary to U.S. interests in the region. . .
. . .What's not very clear as yet is how much Kerry is making administration strategy, versus simply carrying it out energetically, as Clinton often did. To a striking degree, new National Security Advisor Susan Rice has taken charge inside the White House, officials say, and Obama himself remains his own No. 1 strategist. But if there are deals to be made and Kerry's the one in the camera shot, he'll get a lot of the credit. And he may yet leave his mark as America's top diplomat.