Over the last two months, according to the State Department, Secretary of State John Kerry has spent 31 days traveling to 18 countries. He has spent 123 hours in the air. He has been to Turkey three times. He has met five times with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Kerry has served, in short, as a one-man diplomatic corps, a first responder to global crises. Meanwhile, the State Department limps along with hardly an assistant secretary in place.

You could argue that Kerry has his priorities backwards. But you would be wrong.
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But you also can't make progress on any of these frozen crises without making a new start. Middle East peace talks, Israel-Turkey relations, negotiations with Iran -- they've all been more or less in a holding pattern since 2010. On Syria, the Obama administration has adopted a policy of no policy while its worst fears -- a sectarian civil war serving as a magnet for jihadists -- have come to pass; the Syrian regime has now provoked a crisis in the White House by apparently transgressing the President's "red line" on the use of chemical weapons. Iraq, too, is coming apart at the seams, with a Shiite government trying to crush its Sunni opponents. In his angry screed, Dispensable Nation, Vali Nasr charges that Obama has abandoned his own professed faith in diplomacy. But Kerry hasn't; and he is doing his best to renew the administration's depleted energies.
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Kerry may prove to be wrong; but as a friend of mine used to say, you can't hit if you don't swing. I asked Nicholas Burns, who after serving five secretaries of state, most recently as undersecretary to Condoleezza Rice, may be the foremost authority on the job: Has he watched Kerry's one-man show with any misgivings? The opposite, he said. He compared Kerry to the most successful recent secretaries, including James Baker and George Schultz, who worked the big issues relentlessly, personally, and several levels deep. "There is no substitute for the secretary of state in our system," as Burns put it. In the end, he says, the secretary is "negotiator-in-chief," and has to spend more time personally tending to crises than managing the department and even fighting inter-agency battles.
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Kerry has, in fact, been here before. Since 2009, he has talked Karzai and Kayani off a series of ledges, only to see them climb back up once he's left town. The fact that he's now secretary of state adds weight to his diplomacy, but it won't change that dynamic. The United States, Afghanistan, and Pakistan have national security interests which clash in central ways; diplomacy can not change that, though it can help leaders recognize and build on their shared interests. Kerry is genuinely good at that. We'll see how much it matters.

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I have written in the past that Kerry is a man of physical courage and intellectual caution. I have no reason to change that view. But now that he is secretary of state, what matters is whether he has what I would call diplomatic courage: the willingness to throw yourself into a negotiation whose outcome you know that you cannot control, and which may well end badly. Of course one also needs prudence, judgment, patience, and hard work; but we already know Kerry has that. Now we know as well that he is prepared to take risks, to err on the side of trying. If Obama can bring himself to trust him, Kerry just might accomplish big things.