They’ve been surprised with Kerry — pleasantly, but surprised. Kerry's leverage diplomacy

John Kerry’s official visit to Muscat, Oman in May was public. So was his bilateral meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif during the United Nations General Assembly in New York in September.

What wasn’t known was how the two trips tied together: in Oman, he was there to deliver the message that the administration was still interested in the secret negotiations with Tehran that had been going on for two years, but on hold while waiting to see if the Iranian elections would produce a government interested in continuing, according to a person close to the talks. The meeting with Zarif led to two phone calls that jump-started the talks that produced the agreement in Geneva.


For the White House, the Iran agreement is the first truly tangible sign that Kerry’s confidence in himself and his ability to leverage decades of relationships around the world wasn’t just eye-roll inspiring, but might actually produce results.

( PHOTOS: Pols respond to the Iran nuclear deal)

They’ve been surprised — pleasantly, but surprised — people in both the White House and State Department acknowledge. President Barack Obama and his aides picked Kerry in part because he knew all the foreign leaders. They weren’t convinced of how many actually liked him — or what difference it would make for him as secretary of state.

But Kerry’s eagerness to gamble and press his connections around the world in service of Obama’s interest in transforming the Iranian relationship are a big part of why he got the job — and why the president at a fundraiser on Monday praised “the agreement that John Kerry, who is doing a great job as secretary of state, was able to construct.”

Now comes the test that will define what becomes of Kerry in his dream job: whether he can bring home a final agreement on Iran that all the parties agree to and doesn’t get overthrown by Congress, whether he can continue the Twister game of Middle East deals without everything collapsing, and whether he can do so without sacrificing his dream of being the man who finally does the impossible and gets the Israelis and Palestinians to sign a final, two-state peace.

( Also on POLITICO: Short-term political price for Iran deal)

“Powerful people on the Arabian Peninsula and in the Gulf have deep misgivings about particularly Iran, and Secretary Kerry has not tiptoed around that — he’s gone and sat down with them,” said Strobe Talbott, a former deputy secretary of state in the Clinton administration who’s now president of the Brookings Institution and chairman of the Foreign Affairs Policy Board, and has known the secretary since their days together at Yale. “The fact that the person talking to them is somebody that they know and have known for many administrations — he is a walking, talking, familiar reminder of the underlying consistency in U.S. policy.”

There’s a number of factors that make people in the administration more confident about realizing the kind of things that usually just make for dreams and convoluted “Homeland” plots: Obama is in his second term, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is weakened by his own tight reelection, Palestinians who were prepared to make a new statehood push at the U.N. and needed to be headed off, a new president in Iran, revived international interest in the Syrian civil war.

But the process that led to last weekend’s agreement predates all of them. It started in November 2011, while Kerry was still the senior senator from Massachusetts. He was involved throughout.

The White House turned to Kerry because of his success in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the perceived closeness to the administration that made the White House feel he would be confidently seen as speaking for it, according to a person close to the talks. They turned to the Omanis because of their consistent back-channel role in the region, including the two American hikers who’d been kept in Iranian jail for two years but freed that September.

Amid meetings with White House officials, Kerry hosted Omani officials in his private Senate Foreign Relations Committee meeting room in the Capitol — giving him a chance to warm them up by showing off the brass nameplates on the chairs where Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and President John F. Kennedy once sat, the person involved said.

( WATCH: Mike Rogers: Hill left in dark on Iran deal)

The trip to Muscat was planned. Kerry met with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to tell him he was working on a secret project with the White House, and work out a voting schedule that would minimize the attention to his absence.

Then he met for hours with Omani officials and the sultan himself. They talked Sunni-Shia relations, nuclear weapons, arts and architecture — Kerry brought him an antique book about the Emerald Necklace chain of parks in Boston, and talked about his wife’s work on behalf of the arts in Pittsburgh, the person close to the talks said.

His Oman Air flight left Dec. 8, 2011. He was back in Boston just after midnight on his 68th birthday on Dec. 11. Back in Washington, he helped arrange the ongoing Oman meetings that Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns, Obama adviser and National Security Council staff member Puneet Talwar and Biden national security adviser Jake Sullivan had with the Iranians.

Kerry and Hillary Clinton both ran for president, and both came into the administration without a great personal rapport with Obama. But while Obama pursued Clinton to be his secretary of state, Kerry’s pursuit of the job was too well-known to even count as an open secret. Obama took pains to be seen as close to Clinton, making sure her inclusion in decision-making was well-known. That hasn’t been true of Kerry.

Clinton was viewed as more cautious, in part because of her personality and experience — and in part, goes the assumption that Clinton’s circle scoffs at, because she didn’t want to risk failures hanging around her neck ahead of a presidential run. Kerry knows this is the end of the line for him in public life, and felt this was where it was all headed after the 2004 campaign ended.

And not insignificantly: Clinton took over from eight years of global relationships strained by the Bush administration that she spent her term trying to repair. Kerry took over from her, and the new foundation she’d built.

Obama and Clinton became close. Obama and Kerry got off to a rocky start that only started to improve as they compared impressions of private meetings during their trip to Israel at the end of March, people familiar with the conversation said. In the months since, people in the administration say, a president known for taking a direct interest in foreign affairs has delegated with confidence in Kerry — and not the way that he “has confidence in” Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius these days.

Clinton’s biggest asset was a global brand. Kerry’s was a global Rolodex.

The secretary “has a very traditional view of diplomacy. He admires how James Baker put together a coalition for the Gulf War,” said David Wade, Kerry’s chief of staff from the Senate who followed him to the State Department. “Those were not relationships that started from scratch; those were relationships honed over a number of years.”

He has too much faith, said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) — an old friend who introduced Kerry at his confirmation hearing in January — who, speaking before the Iran deal was announced, called the secretary’s approach “not only not effective, but harmful to America.”

“He, like many others have believed, thinks that because his cause is just, that others will be convinced. And that isn’t always the case in international diplomacy,” McCain said. “By knowing and having relationships with them, therefore they will agree with him, and that just doesn’t happen.”

A senior administration official dismissed the critique as having “a certain irony in comments made by someone who has had nothing to do with the start of a peace process between the Israelis and Palestinians, not brokered a deal on chemical weapons, not set forward a first step for the end of Iran’s nuclear program, not helped strike a deal on a Bilateral Security Agreement with Afghanistan on what progress means.”

When McCain talks about success, the official said, “clearly he has a different definition of the word than the rest of the country.”

The downside of the Iran agreement, as observers have begun to point out, is that the Iran deal the president wanted might have come at the cost of the Israeli-Palestinian peace deal that Kerry desperately wants as his defining achievement, and has been pushing for since he walked into the building. During the Obama campaign’s debate prep last year — when Kerry was playing Mitt Romney — the president mentioned that he wished he’d gone to Israel during his first term, according to a person who was at the session. Kerry used that as an opening to renew Obama’s interest in the peace process.

People in the State Department warned him of the dangers of getting sunk by becoming the latest person to fail at the peace process. Kerry’s reaction, according to a person who spoke with him, was “I don’t care” — the risk of not pursuing it was far worse than the risk of failure.

Now that dream may be dead, said former Bush NSC Near East and North African director Elliott Abrams, arguing that the Iran agreement could have “hydraulic problems: as it rises, his Palestinian-Israeli agreement begins to fail.”

That could be accentuated precisely because of how much of what Kerry’s doing is bound up in his relationships — not being straight with his old friend Bibi, Abrams said, has the added weight of being perceived as a personal slight.

“How are you going to get them to trust the secretary when he was visiting Israel when secret negotiations were under way and he was not mentioning them?” Abrams asked.

The administration has expressed hope that this can be overcome as Israeli officials arrive in Washington for consultations about the preliminary agreement and negotiations toward a final deal.

“We’ve had differences with Israel over the course of the five years at times, but it hasn’t detracted us or deterred us in being able to work together on different things,” said a senior administration official Monday. “Trust is important, but where that trust comes in to play is our ability to sit down with them and lay out, ‘Here’s why we think that this can enhance your security,’ and we were going to have to do that work anyway on Palestinian track, and the same is going to hold true on the end state negotiations on Iran.”

“Secretary Kerry’s view has always been that they are separate, but related because both are focused on Israel’s security,” added a senior State Department official.

The current strategy may risk all three big Middle East goals — not to mention Iraq, the chaos in Egypt and the possibility that the American-friendly kings in Saudi Arabia and Jordan could fall — by trying to fit them all together.

“John Kerry is the marriage of circumstance and human agency that drives success and failure,” said Aaron David Miller, an aide to six previous secretaries of state. “He is in a position to act: he has the bureaucratic openness, an interest in risk as a person, and he’s got circumstances abroad which opened up, as they did not in the first term.”