Middle East

John Kerry Rushes In Where Obama Will Not Tread

By PETER BAKERSEPT. 29, 2015

Secretary of State John Kerry with President Vladimir Putin and Sergey Lavrov, left, of Russia on Monday at the United Nations. Credit Pool photo by Mikhail Klimentiev

WASHINGTON — For four years, President Obama has watched the civil war in Syria with deep frustration. It is, he tells advisers, an intractable situation, though he uses a grittier word. The best the United States can do in the short term, he says, is manage it as much as possible.

But to Secretary of State John Kerry, the mushrooming crisis cries out for American attention. No less aware of the challenge, he seems willing to go anywhere, anytime, and meet with anyone in pursuit of a resolution. The idea that it may be elusive, or even impossible, is no deterrent.

The disparate outlooks define the administration’s approach as the crisis metastasizes from a blood bath that has cost more than 200,000 lives and fueled a resurgence of Islamic radicalism into a new confrontation with Russia and a refugee crisis engulfing Europe. The Obama and Kerry views are not incompatible, advisers say, but they shape the internal discussions that drive the American response.

“There’s probably a psychological difference between the two,” said Frederic C. Hof, who worked on Syria as a State Department official during Mr. Obama’s first term. “The president is at peace determining that something is just a loser, that if he touches it, he’s going to make it worse. Whereas Kerry has the typical American engineering approach to things — there’s a problem, there’s a way to fix it, somehow.”

Syria, so far, has defied every attempt to fix it, although critics argue the administration has not tried hard enough. Mr. Obama demanded the resignation of President Bashar al-Assad without success. He threatened retaliation if Syria crossed a “red line” by using chemical weapons against civilians, but aborted strikes in favor of a negotiated removal of Mr. Assad’s arsenal.

The yearlong military campaign against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, has in the meantime made little headway. Pentagon officials, who recently acknowledged that only four to five American-trained Syrian rebels were actually in the fight, said on Tuesday that they would keep trying to recruit fighters but that for now “we have paused the actual movement of new recruits from Syria.”

Mr. Obama’s aides acknowledge the lack of progress, but argue that critics do not have any better ideas beyond sending in more military forces. Taking what he sees as the lesson of the Iraq war, Mr. Obama has made it clear that American ground troops remain off the table, a position with broad public support.

As disturbing as the destruction in Syria has been, aides said Mr. Obama’s main priority was to safeguard American interests, leaving him willing to take direct action against the Islamic State but not Mr. Assad’s government. While the president seeks to manage the crisis, aides said, that does not mean he is hands off.

The distinction between his approach and Mr. Kerry’s has played out in a variety of areas, including Middle East peace talks and nuclear negotiations with Iran. White House officials give Mr. Kerry plenty of latitude to pursue deals they do not view as likely to come to fruition, while keeping a distance. “That’s Kerry’s thing,” presidential aides will say. But they will back him up if it appears he is gaining traction, as he ultimately did with Iran.

The new discussions with Russia are a case in point. For the last two years, Mr. Obama has basically frozen out President Vladimir V. Putin mainly over the Kremlin’s intervention in Ukraine, refusing any formal meeting with him until agreeing to one on Monday in the wake of Russia’s military deployment to Syria. By contrast, Mr. Kerry has kept up a constant dialogue with the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov. Sometimes Mr. Kerry talks to him hours on end, multiple times in a week.

“Obama seems to approach Syria with a professor’s detachment while Kerry — perhaps because of his high regard for his own diplomatic acuity — sees it as something he can solve,” said David Schenker, the director of the Program on Arab Politics at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

To some extent, this reflects the differing roles of a president and a secretary of state. “It’s Kerry’s job to engage and explore the art of the possible here,” said an adviser to the president who like other officials did not want to be identified discussing internal dynamics. “The president’s got a whole bunch of other things to worry about. He needs to be able to delegate to Kerry to do this.”

That does not mean Mr. Kerry is any more optimistic about the chances of success in Syria. “I wouldn’t rule out the idea that Kerry has the same intellectual view of it as Obama but feels his role as secretary of state is to try anyway,” said Paul R. Pillar, a scholar at Georgetown University and retired senior C.I.A. official.

Even so, Mr. Kerry’s predecessor, Hillary Rodham Clinton, was rarely as eager to jump into seemingly hopeless negotiations, and instead picked those where she judged progress most possible. Mr. Kerry, by contrast, does not hesitate. “He thinks by working the problem hard, with a little creativity, a strategic approach — and the sheer force of his will — he can create opportunities and make things happen,” a top adviser said.

At times, Mr. Kerry in his zeal risks a backlash. When he went to Sochi, Russia, this year to meet with Mr. Putin, the Russians spun the session as a validation of the Kremlin’s role in the world, and Mr. Kerry was accused of looking weak.

At times, the White House and State Department do appear to be on different pages. Even as Mr. Kerry delivered a blistering speech vowing an armed response to Mr. Assad’s use of chemical weapons in 2013, Mr. Obama decided to ask Congress first. And one of the biggest diplomatic breakthroughs, the opening to Cuba, was negotiated not by the State Department but by the White House.

But some administration officials said privately that Mr. Obama and his circle might be increasingly concerned about the impact of Syria on his legacy. Asked on “Morning Joe” on MSNBC on Tuesday if history will conclude that Mr. Obama did not do enough, Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said: “It’s hard to say. That’s certainly the possibility.”

“But,” he added, “I also think that right now if we were having this discussion and there were 75,000 U.S. military personnel on the ground inside of Syria, the stakes for the United States would be a heck of a lot higher.”

Now that Russia is playing a more assertive role in Syria, Mr. Kerry hopes to persuade the Kremlin to broker a political solution that ends with Mr. Assad’s departure, although the Americans and Europeans concede that it may not take place immediately.

Mr. Kerry expressed hope again on Tuesday. “The agreement is that we want to save Syria, keep it unified, keep it secular,” he said on the same MSNBC program. “So surely in those very fundamental principles in which we could agree, we should be able to find” common ground.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/30/world/middleeast/john-kerry-rushes-in-where-obama-will-not-tread.

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Thursday, October 1, 2015