I know of no occupation other than diplomat in which a practitioner who consistently and embarrassingly fails at his job is rewarded with a pat on the back and many more attempts to cock things up. A surgeon who admits that he’s yet to save a patient on the slab will soon find himself seeking other means of employment. A certified public accountant whose clients are annually audited will eventually choose to pursue that lifelong dream of stand-up comedy. A web designer who can’t program a functioning website will go to work for the White House. But diplomacy, especially as conducted by the United States of late, seems to be a field in which competence and sapience are retrograde and one gets all the points simply for trying.
Right now a woman called Wendy Sherman is leading American efforts to get the mullahs of Iran to halt or slow their nuclear program in exchange for international sanctions relief. In October, Sherman told the Senate, “No deal is better than a bad deal.” Yet a little over a week ago, she needed alerting from her French counterparts that she and her team were sleepwalking into a “jeu de dupes” with a pariah nation quite good at skullduggery and hard bargain-driving. Sherman, it bears mentioning, was also the negotiator responsible 13 years ago for a similar series of bad-faith dealmaking with Kim Jong-Il, designed to stop him from acquiring or building nuclear weapons. Now his son has got several, some of which he not long ago threatened to launch at the United States. When the elder Kim expired in 2011, Sherman described the midget dictator of the world’s only remaining Stalinist slave state as “smart and a quick problem-solver,” and also as “witty and humorous. Our overall impression was very different from the way he was known to the outside world.” Iran’s foreign minister could give this woman the finger in Geneva and she’d probably call him “playful.”
Another diplomat who has been too voluble and visible for his own good is Ryan Crocker, the former US ambassador to Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, in whose performance in these roles was characterized by several Beltway observers of my acquaintance using an easy reconfiguration of his surname. Indeed, Crocker has recently suggested that the only solution for Syria is to “contain” a crisis that has now precipitated terrorist attacks in Lebanon, Turkey, and Iraq, and so far led to the arrest of Jabhat al-Nusra jihadis for planning attacks in Kosovo. Al-Qaeda’s largest safe haven in history lies just south of the border of a NATO member, and several US intelligence officials are on record as saying that this is hardly a manageable or containable state of affairs.
Crocker’s got other funny ideas about what happens in this part of the world. In his extraordinary New Yorker profile of Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps-Quds Force commander Qassem Suleimani, Dexter Filkins interviewed the ex-ambassador about many things including his immediate post-9/11 role as a senior State Department official trying to quietly secure Iranian assistance for the US war against the Taliban. Crocker told Filkins that Suleimani, a man who would later boast about killing US soldiers in Iraq and who is today overseeing the construction of a 100,000-strong sectarian militia in Syria, was deep down thinking “[m]aybe it’s time to rethink our relationship with the Americans” and might have even been lured into a rapprochement with the Great Satan – until, that is, George W. Bush gave his “Axis of Evil” speech and included Iran in that axis. “We were just that close,” Crocker said. “One word in one speech changed history.” One quote in a New Yorker article gave Suleimani the laugh of his life.
Still, no one beats the game of celebrated statecraft-bungling better than John Kerry. The Secretary of State has recently been on the receiving end of quite a lot of press, some of it hostile, such as Jackson Diehl’s withering editorial in the Washington Post and John McCain’s “human wrecking ball” comment. But much of it is written in a journalistic style that curiously resembles Foreign Service communiqués expressing “cautious optimism” about events universally seen in hysterically pessimistic terms. An entire lexicon of euphemism appears to have been invented to suit the e-for-effort, atta-boy spin-doctoring needs of America’s globe-trotting Walter Mitty. This New York Times headline, for example, describes Kerry as “active and improvising,” which is how I’d describe a drunken uncle practicing loose gallantry at Thanksgiving. Consider: “Mr. Kerry’s effort to broker peace between Israel and the Palestinians is still an uphill struggle.” A climb of Mount Kilimanjaro is an uphill struggle.
