Susan Glasser is editor of Politico.

Globe-trotting Secretary of State John Kerry was on one of his rare stopovers in Washington, when I caught up with him the other day. “I’m here a lot more than people think,” he said, smiling but sounding defensive, even before he sat down to begin our conversation in the sunny anteroom of his headquarters on the seventh floor of the State Department.

Never mind the 245,000 miles and counting on the old Boeing 757, he insisted; he’s not permanently on an airplane, leaving Foggy Bottom to run on autopilot. Neither is he a cockeyed optimist, promising a Middle East peace that remains as elusive as ever. And yes, he is consulted by the White House—recent evidence of his exclusion from major decisions and policy reviews to the contrary. “I can call the president anytime and see him anytime I need to,” he told me in what amounted to his first extensive comments on the latest outbreak of second-guessing that has greeted his wide-ranging diplomatic forays. The secretary of state went on to dismiss the “Washingtonian… political babble” that he is permanently cut out of the Obama loop, protested that “I’m inured to all of that by now” and just generally told his critics in polite but insistent terms to pipe down.


Certainly, there are plenty of critics to answer; everyone, it seems, is taking a swing at John Kerry these days. Just hours before our interview, his old friend and longtime Senate colleague John McCain had called him a “ human wrecking ball,” an insult apparently aimed at the secretary’s penchant for careening around the globe on person-to-person diplomatic missions. Not long before that, the French foreign minister publicly torched his Iran nuclear deal, calling it a “ fool’s bargain,” while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blasted it as “ the deal of the century”—for the Iranians.

And then there was a scathing column by Jackson Diehl in the Washington Post, mocking Kerry for living in a “dream world” of his own making, a “delusional” bubble where peace is really possible in the Middle East, the Russians are actually trying to help us end the war in Syria and the Egyptian generals who overthrew an elected government didn’t in fact carry out a coup.

Clearly, the harsh words sting, especially at a moment when Kerry has so many diplomatic balls in the air that it’s almost impossible to say whether he’ll end up looking like a negotiating genius—or a secretary with a bad case of overreach. “I am an optimist,” Kerry told me, “because I am one by nature; in this job you have to be. But I am not running around suggesting to people anything is easy or will happen quickly. Never suggested that ever…. If Middle East peace was easy, it would’ve been done a long time ago. I have no illusions. But I would ask Jackson Diehl and anyone else who was critical of our engagement: What is the alternative?”

And yet, listening to Kerry as he describes the many fronts of his frenetic diplomacy, from the deadly gridlock of the Syrian civil war to the maddening grind of persuading the Israelis to talk peace with their neighbors, his optimism is still what surprises. The secretary of state is not in a dream world exactly, but he is taking on some of the heaviest diplomatic lifts of the last several decades with a blithe confidence and willingness to bang his patrician head against brick walls that others would avoid—and have.

What’s the goal of all this? You get the sense from Kerry that engagement is his ideology, that showing up has become a form of strategy for him, a rationale that is a convenient blend of his personal mission—and the broader challenge of proving that America, while tired and bloodied by a decade of overseas military engagements from Afghanistan to Iraq, has not abandoned the stage altogether. What is the choice, he asks rhetorically over and over again. What is the choice?

As he says of his long and so far not very rewarding talks aimed at starting a Syrian peace process: “Do you just sit on your rear end and do nothing? Or do you try to get to the political solution? … I’m not starry-eyed about it. It’s harder than hell…. But I know the alternative is worse. If you want a complete implosion of Syria, and you want to see terrorism rise—which it is, even now—and you want more pressure on Jordan, which is our ally and friend and beleaguered by refugees, do nothing.”

Of course, to many, nothing is more or less exactly what all the months and months of talking have so far produced; in fact, the latest effort to bring the warring Syrian parties to the table in Geneva has just been pushed back to an indeterminate “ striving” for a meeting by the end of this year.

But it’s fair to say that rarely has a recent secretary encountered so many simultaneous crises, and this week’s fracas is not over Syria but the terms of a possible interim deal with the Iranians for a six-month freeze on their nuclear program, a deal that Kerry failed to close despite flying to Geneva earlier this month. Now, not only are the Iranians themselves balking, but there’s a full-scale uproar among Kerry’s longtime colleagues in Congress, who may just yet scotch the deal by passing even tougher sanctions on the Iranians.

So who, I asked him, was tougher to bargain with: the Iranians, the Israelis, allies like the French, Democrats on Capitol Hill, Republicans on Capitol Hill, or the White House back home wanting to control it all? Just hours earlier he had left a briefing on Capitol Hill with fuming senators of both parties in his wake and little progress in heading off the threat of additional sanctions before talks with Iran resume this week (“John Kerry’s Iran Briefing Succeeds… in Solidifying GOP Against Him,” ran a headline in Foreign Policy).

“I honestly don’t calculate this week as tougher than a lot of weeks over the course of the last nine months,” Kerry responded.

But if that’s the case, it’s only because he’s had such a tumultuous time in the job since replacing Hillary Clinton last February. From the start, Kerry signaled that he would take a sharply different approach than his more politically calculating predecessor, with one adviser sniffing dismissively to Politico about her “ odometer diplomacy” and promising that Kerry would avoid the showy set-pieces and focus on the tougher strategic challenges, like the stalled Israel-Palestine negotiations, that Clinton had steered away from in favor of grand public diplomacy tours and a sweepingly named but amorphous “pivot” to Asia.

Pretty quickly, however, it became clear that Kerry would be spending even more time airborne than the peripatetic Clinton—he’s already posted nearly 245,000 miles and 35 countries, compared with 153,000 miles and 42 countries for her at the same moment—and that he favored an improvisational, let’s-squeeze-in-one-more-country-and-one-more-meeting approach to his many overseas trips. The Asia pivot, announced with much fanfare so recently, soon seemed little more than a PR ploy by a fickle America as obsessed as ever by the Middle East, and Kerry’s own penchant for straying off-message guaranteed a constant stream of stories about what the United States was really up to.

It can all seem like the opposite of the careful strategery that is generally favored by the grand Washington pooh-bahs of foreign policy, and indeed McCain mocked him for it the other day: “Fly into Riyadh and talk to the king of Saudi Arabia. Fly into Egypt and praise their steps toward democracy,” the senator snarked; it’s diplomacy by “fire drill.”

Others are less harsh, and I have heard many establishment eminences in recent months give Kerry high marks for his willingness to at least take on the hard tasks they fault Clinton for avoiding. Clinton, one such veteran told me, was “too cautious,” while Kerry, he added, risks being “merely frenetic.” And indeed, it’s an open question whether and how Kerry can succeed at the ambitious portfolio he’s now taken on. Kerry, one senior Obama administration official who worked with both him and Clinton told me recently, “is like a diamond in the light with two facets. On one, there’s a sense of boldness and determination that is quite impressive. But on the next turn of the diamond you see the ‘delusional’ part, where he is relentlessly throwing the dice all on the Middle East.”

One of Kerry’s most pressing problems may be not with the Netanyahus of the world but with the Washington chattering class, which has come to believe that he has neither the clout, independence nor stature of his celebrity predecessor Clinton, who negotiated the right to name her own senior staff and, if she was not always warmly embraced by a West Wing still embittered by her primary run against Obama, was still taken too seriously to be openly excluded.

Those impressions were further cemented by a recent New York Times report that national security adviser Susan Rice had conducted a Middle East strategic review without including Kerry (that’s because it was a review focused on preparing for Obama’s September speech to the U.N. General Assembly, a Kerry aide told me) and the news, confirmed last week by Obama’s chief of staff in Politico Magazine, that the president decided to go to Congress for authorization of military action on Syria without consulting Kerry first.

We weighed in and all had ample opportunity the next morning in a meeting to be able to have a discussion about it, so this is just Washingtonian—whatever it is, the political babble that people get into here.”

“No,” insisted Kerry in our interview, “he called me to talk about it. He called me to ask, ‘Here’s what I’m thinking, what do you think?” But had Obama already decided, I asked? “The White House has the privilege of making its decisions when it wants, as it wants, and I work for them,” the secretary diplomatically answered. “I think we weighed in and all had ample opportunity the next morning in a meeting to be able to have a discussion about it, so this is just Washingtonian—whatever it is, the political babble that people get into here.”

Kerry checks his Blackberry before a meeting with European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in Geneva, Nov. 9, 2013. | Jason Reed/Reuters

Remember that Kerry is very much a creature of that Washingtonian mindset, and that after more than 30 years in the Senate, he remains exquisitely attuned to the vagaries of Beltway reputation. And that nothing matters more than access and clout with the White House—perceived or otherwise—for someone in Kerry’s position. “The president has been exceedingly generous in giving me latitude to do things, to engage, to come up with ideas, to work with him… and to follow his policy direction,” Kerry said. “And that’s what we’re doing.” What’s more, he added, “The White House has not ordered me to hire one single person. They’ve given me incredible latitude. … I actually stole some people from the White House.”

Kerry was in the midst of talking about his still-incomplete senior staff at the State Department—his appointees are being held up by Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, who’s demanding more administration disclosure about the killing of the U.S. ambassador and other Americans in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012—when an aide interrupted him with a note. The prime minister of Albania was on the line, and Kerry ended the interview to talk to the Albanian about accepting Syria’s stockpile of chemical weapons so they can be destroyed. It is a key part of Kerry’s plan to salvage some accomplishment out of the wreckage of the Syrian civil war.

But these are tough times to be John Kerry, and this would not turn out to be a showcase for his resurgent diplomacy; even the Albanians, reliable allies since the end of the Cold War, are a tough sell these days. When they go public with the result of the call the next day, it is to announce there will be no deal with the U.S. secretary of state. Crowds gather in the streets of Tirana, cheering the decision to refuse the chemical weapons and rebuff the Americans.

Susan B. Glasser is editor of Politico Magazine.