John Kerry is recognizing reality.

"The United States and our partners are not seeking so-called regime change," Kerry told reporters in the Russian capital after meeting President Vladimir Putin. A major international conference on Syria would take place later this week in New York, Kerry announced. Kerry reiterated the U.S. position that Assad, accused by the West of massive human rights violations and chemical weapons attacks, won't be able to steer Syria out of more than four years of conflict. But after a day of discussions with Assad's key international backer, Kerry said the focus now is "not on our differences about what can or cannot be done immediately about Assad." Rather, it is on facilitating a peace process in which "Syrians will be making decisions for the future of Syria."

Meanwhile, Chris Christie is crazier than a loon.

Christie doubled down on his no-fly zone proposal, adding that the "rules of engagement would be very clear…If [Russians] go into our no-fly zone after we've warned them to stay out, then they would be shot down," the Republican contender, bumped up from the undercard Fox Business debate into CNN's main stage on Tuesday, told CBS News. "It will be made very clear to them what those rules were. If they decided to violate them, that's what the no-fly zone means - don't fly, and if they fly there, their pilot will get shot down." The New Jersey governor also expressed skepticism that Russia was truly a U.S. ally in the fight against the extremist terror group the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). "I don't believe that that's the case," he said. "The fact is Russia's been stealing our lunch money the entire time from the Obama administration—from Hillary Clinton's reset button to going into Crimea and Ukraine and the activities they're doing in Syria to prop up their puppet, Assad. So ISIS is simply not being attacked by Russia. Russia is in Syria along with Iran to prop up Assad." Christie continued: "If that offends folks in the U.N. crowd, I' m sorry but America needs to assert itself again."

One guy is a statesman. The other guy is really going to make Putin pay at recess.

Meanwhile, John McCain still is puzzling over what happened in 2008, and he's sought refuge from his confusion in the latest production of Bad Historical Analogy Theater.

Kerry's comments were met with a strong rebuke from US Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. "That can only be matched by Neville Chamberlain's trip to Munich, to say that a butcher who has killed 240,000 of his own people, used chemical weapons and caused millions of refugees [might be allowed to remain in power] is a low point in American diplomatic history," McCain told Defense News.

Syria is starting to make people crazy, which is understandable. A really bad guy happens to be one of the people on the ground fighting the organization of which all of us over here are supposed to be terrified. (I just spent a morning watching Andrea Mitchell tell ghost stories about how scared "the American people" are, and she's supposed to be one of the sensible ones.) In a recent profile in The New Yorker, while discussing the state of Israeli-Palestinian relations, Kerry showed an admirable inclination to let people sort out their own problems.

"No, I don't believe that's going to happen," he said. "It's just, What is it going to be like, is the question. Will it be a democracy? Will it be a Jewish state? Or will it be a unitary state with two systems, or some draconian treatment of Palestinians, because to let them vote would be to dilute the Jewish state? I don't know. I have no answer to that. But the problem is, neither do they. Neither do the people who are supposed to be providing answers to this. It is not an answer to simply continue to build in the West Bank and to destroy the homes of the other folks you're trying to make peace with and pretend that that's a solution."

More directly, Kerry told David Remnick quite frankly that this may be the last chance to solve a question for which there are no good answers.

Either way, his job, as he sees it, is to persuade. The American position is still that Assad must go, but, in order to keep Russia and Iran in the discussion, Obama and Kerry have fudged the question of when. "I believe Syria can be put back together still," Kerry told me. "But I think this is the last shot to try to do it. I think that if you can't do this it could break up into enclaves and Iraq could—I mean, you could see a lot of things happen. This is not the Thirty Years' War today. But, if allowed to fester unabated by the peace process or by a solution, this could become a kind of Thirty Years' War, because it could develop into a bona-fide, full-fledged Sunni-Shia conflagration."

Ultimately, though, it's up to the people who are killing each other to decide not to kill each other any more. The United States should do everything it can to encourage this. That's all that's left for us in that wounded part of the world. John Kerry, at least, recognizes that Damascus is not Munich.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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