John Kerry

The sentences you took really tell the whole story.

The first paragraph is one of the few times I have seen a MSM comment that notes Kerry was indispensable on Iran and climate change. On both of what are Obama's two biggest foreign policy successes, beyond tirelessly working to achieve them, Kerry persuaded Obama to put his political capital behind two important goals that conventional wisdom said were unlikely to succeed. With the Iran deal, he made a war with Iran that was rather likely change to unlikely. The Paris Climate Accord that hopefully will go into affect this year is a tremendously important agreement that would not have happened without him.

If I had one little quibble with that sentence, it was not just his persistence, but that he persuaded Obama to allow him to make that effort and incredible intelligence, creativity and ability to really work with others. On Iran, it may have been his more than willingness to work side by side with Secretary Moniz as a team that together were incredibly able to define solutions to problems.

On climate change, it was not just persistence, but his long personal role in climate summits that meant he both knew the issues and had people who knew and trusted him in places like China among their negotiators. Even the Bush administration in Senate and House hearings thanked Kerry for his work in Bali. As to persistence, he was willing to spend his political capital, time and energy and wanted to make this a signature issue even though at the point that he became Secretary of State, the administration was not convinced that anything could be done diplomatically. (They were using EPA etc domestically)

Kerry speaking at the opening of a new international studies at IU, said:

To be honest, when I became Secretary of State, I was told that climate change was not likely to be a promising area for diplomacy. And China was a big part of the reason, because we had been completely opposed to each other at the last global meeting on climate in Copenhagen, and China was leading the charge of 77 nations to say your responsibility, not ours. China and the United States are now the two largest emitters of greenhouse gases in the world, just shy of 50 percent of all the gases. But earlier efforts at cooperation were nonstarters.

So shortly after I was sworn in in that February date that the president mentioned, I think I went to China in late March, early April. And I had called them two weeks earlier, called my counterpart and said, “Look, here’s what we need to do. We need to come together. We’ve got to find a way to work on this. And when I come, I have a plan. We’re going to lay it down, and let’s see if we can do this.” I proposed the start of regular, formal discussions with China that could break down the barriers and begin to build up our capacity to work together, and laid out every aspect of the issue in a systematic way.

Last fall, I visited – I invited the Chinese state councilor to my hometown of Boston to talk about what more our nations could do together in order to tackle the problem. And then in January, after we’d laid the groundwork, President Obama went to Beijing for further talks. The result was a spectacle that few expected: The American and Chinese presidents standing side-by-side in the Great Hall in Beijing to announce their nations’ respective – their agreement to announce their nations’ respective greenhouse gas emissions targets for the years to come.

The substance mattered. It was a dramatic moment of transformation, where China and the United States joined together, and it took away the excuse from less-developed countries. And the symbolic breakthrough of this coordination was bigger than many of us maybe even anticipated. Since then, every major economy in the world and 150 nations have come forward with their own set of targets or, in the case of India, unveiled a plan to make massive new investments in alternative energy.
http://www.state.gov/secretary/remarks/2015/10/248257.htm

The later sentences quoted are even more interesting from the NYT. It is very clear from their many articles that they agree with the 51 dissenters and Ash Carter on Syria. As such, it is impressive that they do see someone working against their own preferred policy as "honorable" and "heroic" and credit him with working for constructive results. I am immensely impressed that Obama took the risk of backing Kerry on this rather the cynical position of those concerned that stopping the killing helps Assad or Russia. (It is interesting given that the NYT was very quick through the years of negotiations on Iran to cast doubt, that Iran is unambiguously cited as a success.)

This is likely as positive as the NYT could ever be. They will position - up front - that he did not get a peace settlement on Israel/Palestine even though it was never likely and in retrospect even less likely than could have been seen at the time. Yet his diligent work there may allow Obama to argue that his administration did all that could be done. Still, doing two nearly impossible things is not diminished by not finding a path - that may not exist - to resolve a third.

There is no doubt that Secretary Kerry has used his position as Secretary of State to make the world more peaceful and on a path to deal with environmental issues - whether the big climate deal or the Oceans conferences that he started. He really is and was the real deal we believed him to be.