The Soviet Union died because Communism could not provide rising standards of living, and its collapse actually unleashed boundless human energy all across Eastern Europe and Russia.

He is guilty of the soft bigotry of low expectations toward his people and prefers to turn Russia into a mafia-run petro-state — all the better to steal from.

To put it in market terms, Putin is long oil and short history.

He has made himself steadily richer and Russia steadily more reliant on natural resources rather than its human ones. History will not be kind to him — especially if energy prices ever collapse.

The fact that Putin has seized Crimea, a Russian-speaking zone of Ukraine, once part of Russia, where many of the citizens prefer to be part of Russia and where Russia has a major naval base, is not like taking Poland.

I support economic and diplomatic sanctions to punish Russia for its violation of international norms and making clear that harsher sanctions, even military aid for Kiev, would ensue should Putin try to bite off more of Ukraine.

Putinism used to just be a threat to Russia but is now becoming a threat to global stability.

that little corner of the world is always going to mean more, much more, to Putin than to us, and we should refrain from making threats on which we’re not going to deliver.

I opposed expanding NATO toward Russia after the Cold War, when Russia was at its most democratic and least threatening. It remains one of the dumbest things we’ve ever done and, of course, laid the groundwork for Putin’s rise.

President Bashar al-Assad of Syria is engaged in monstrous, genocidal behavior that also threatens the stability of the Middle East. But Putin stands by him.

At least half the people of Ukraine long to be part of Europe, but he treated that understandable desire as a NATO plot and quickly resorted to force.

It requires going after the twin pillars of his regime: oil and gas. Just as the oil glut of the 1980s, partly engineered by the Saudis, brought down global oil prices to a level that helped collapse Soviet Communism, we could do the same today to Putinism by putting the right long-term policies in place.

by investing in the facilities to liquefy and export our natural gas bounty (provided it is extracted at the highest environmental standards) and making Europe, which gets 30 percent of its gas from Russia, more dependent on us instead.

raise our gasoline tax, put in place a carbon tax and a national renewable energy portfolio standard — all of which would also help lower the global oil price (and make us stronger, with cleaner air, less oil dependence and more innovation).

We’ll do anything to expose Putin’s weakness; anything that isn’t hard. And you wonder why Putin holds us in contempt?

Barack Obama’s administration, accelerating a process that had begun in the early 1960s under President Kennedy, was centralizing foreign-policy decision making in the White House’s National Security Council, marginalizing the State Department.

Finally, Kerry, a defeated presidential candidate, was devoid of the sexiness that automatically attaches to a figure, like Hillary Clinton, who remains a legitimate presidential prospect

The consensus in Washington was that Kerry was a boring if not irrelevant man stepping into what was becoming a boring, irrelevant job.

Nearly a year into his tenure, Kerry is the driving force behind a flurry of Mideast diplomacy the scope of which has not been seen in years. In the face of widespread skepticism, he has revived the Israeli-Palestinian peace process; brokered a deal with Russia to remove chemical weapons from Syria; embarked on a new round of nuclear talks with Iran, holding the highest-level face-to-face talks with Iranian diplomats in years; and started hammering out a new post-withdrawal security agreement with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

it will be Kerry who is credited with making the State Department relevant again.

“He’s front and center on all these issues. That clearly represents a very ambitious first year for any secretary of state.”

Kerry has a bad habit of wandering off script. On a trip to Pakistan in August, he created two diplomatic incidents in a single interview. First he said that the Egyptian army was “restoring democracy” when it toppled the country’s democratically elected president.

President Obama had “a timeline” for ending U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan.

he overshot in the opposite direction, promising that any American strike against Syria would be “unbelievably small”—a bit of impressively self-defeating rhetoric that undermined days of administration efforts to argue that a few dozen Tomahawk cruise-missile strikes would be more than what hawkish critics were calling a pointless “pinprick.”

a word that comes up frequently in conversations about Kerry is gasbag. He had few close friends in the Senate, where he served for nearly 30 years. A former diplomat says Kerry’s recent foreign-policy successes have made him more insufferable than ever.

his gaffes are caused by arrogance and indiscipline. They say that even in a city swollen with egotism and pomposity, Kerry stands out.

“Nobody would challenge the notion that he’s been very much a team player and willing to take on really hard assignments from the president and go to the toughest places.”

(In one late-night press conference in Moscow last May, he uttered a staggering 95-word sentence.

“Even as a junior or senior, he was a pompous blowhard,” says someone who attended Yale with Kerry in the 1960s and asked not to be named.

he is not so much arrogant as awkward.

Liberal Democrats call his hawkish views on Syria a betrayal of his antiwar past. Republicans say he is a perennial flip-flopper: he fought in the Vietnam War and then protested against it; he supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq and then opposed it; he tried to negotiate with Bashar al‑Assad in 2009, then compared him to Adolf Hitler—and then reopened the door to negotiating with him again.

Kerry “just can’t dance.”

Washington mandarins dismiss Kerry’s foreign-policy ambitions as grandiose and overweening, especially relative to what America’s diminishing power can achieve after Iraq and Afghanistan

old foreign-policy hands say that instead of acknowledging the limits of American power in the post–Arab Spring Middle East, Kerry looks for misguided ways to apply power the country no longer has.

Current aides argue that Kerry’s recent successes belie the caricatures of him. “Show me where he hasn’t done this job well,” one demanded when I interviewed him in mid-October.

“I would ask John Kerry, ‘How can you ask a man to be the first one to die for a mistake?’ ”

Kerry seem “pompous” is that “oftentimes he tries too hard.” According to Manley and others, Kerry had a knack for walking up to fellow members on the Senate floor at precisely the wrong time.

His enormous ambition motivates him to aim for major breakthroughs despite daunting odds. And his healthy self-confidence allows him to believe that he can convince anyone of virtually anything.

Kerry also has bottomless reserves of patience that allow him to engage for hours in seemingly fruitless negotiations; he persists long past the time others would have given up in exhaustion.

The amount of time he’s spent negotiating with Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai and Russia’s Sergey Lavrov alone should qualify him for some kind of diplomatic medal of honor.

an indifference to his own political standing.

Political calculations may have constrained the risks Hillary Clinton was willing to take. Kerry, in contrast, no longer needs to heed political consultants. Nor does he need to worry too much about what his detractors say.

“I don’t care at all,” he said. “I could care less about it. You know, David, I ran for president, so I’m not scared of failure.”

secretary of state is the job for which Kerry was born and bred

“I’m not worried about the politics,” Lowenstein recalls Kerry telling him. “I want to get things done.”

Obama, too, no longer has to worry about reelection; concerns about the 2012 election may have limited the president’s own appetite for diplomatic risk taking in the Mideast during his first term.

But his enthusiasm for his current job is unquestionable; one aide told me that he will have to be dragged from the office—fingernails scraping against the floor—at the end of his term.

As a presidential candidate, he had to downplay his obsession with foreign policy and his fluency in foreign languages, for fear that such things would play badly with voters; as secretary of state, he can freely leverage those qualities.

if there is no breakthrough with Iran, or if his efforts to broker peace in Syria fall short, or if the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks founder, history will likely view Kerry as the tragicomic figure his detractors already judge him to be.

“After you lose the presidency, you don’t have much else to lose.”

Following stints as an assistant district attorney and the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, Kerry would, after his election to the Senate in 1984, go on to serve for 28 years on the same committee he had stood before in 1971, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee

(But for Ohio, where he lost to Bush by 119,000 votes, Kerry would have been president.

But Kerry stepped into the role at a singularly weak moment for the position. For one thing, America, weary after a decade of conflict, is turning inward; activist diplomacy is out of favor. For another, State Department employees I interviewed told me that morale is low.

the department is too hierarchical, inflexible, and risk-averse—and is in danger of becoming even more so in the aftermath of Benghazi.

the intensely controlling Obama administration has centralized foreign-policy decision making in the National Security Council, weakening the State Department.

Just a day after Kerry delivered one of the most impassioned speeches of his career, assailing Assad’s use of chemical weapons on civilians as a “crime against conscience” and sending a clear signal that U.S. air strikes on Syria were imminent, the president announced that missile strikes might in fact not be imminent, and that he would be seeking congressional authorization to attack Syria.

the president risked causing foreign leaders and negotiators to doubt whether any future warnings or statements issued by Kerry were backed by the White House.

Kerry conducted long interviews with every living former secretary of state—Kissinger, George Shultz, Baker, Madeleine Albright, Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Clinton—and set out to model himself after Shultz, who, in six and a half years serving under Ronald Reagan, was seen as a combination of the two prototypes, both a great diplomat and a good manager.

“I don’t care about risk, honestly,” he said, leaning forward in his chair, spoiling for a fight. “The riskiest thing to do is to not act. I would far rather try and fail than fail not trying.”

When off the record, in relaxed settings, he is refreshingly direct, profane, and insightful, speaking bluntly about the limits of American power and caustically lamenting Washington’s growing paralysis and partisanship

He finishes sentences with phrases such as something like that or that’s about it or thanks, man. Toes tapping, head bobbing back and forth, he speaks with fervor and candor. His tenacity is palpable.

Recent secretaries of state have had different strengths. Henry Kissinger and James Baker, two secretaries who had close relationships with their presidents (Nixon in Kissinger’s case, George H. W. Bush in Baker’s), were powerful bureaucratic players.

But isn’t staking America’s credibility, and his own reputation, on long-odds breakthrough agreements with Tehran or Moscow, or on Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, a dubious exercise, as Obama’s failed first-term efforts at Mideast peace demonstrated?

Colin Powell lost a crucial internal administration battle in failing to halt the Bush White House’s march to war in Iraq—but was adored at the State Department for implementing sweeping administrative reforms.

Clinton embraced a new, Google Hangout era of town-hall diplomacy, and she elevated economic development and women’s issues. She was an architect of the administration’s “pivot to Asia,” and she took risks in supporting the Afghanistan troop surge and the intervention in Libya.

steered clear of the Middle East, delegating special envoys like Richard Holbrooke and George Mitchell to grapple with the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, peace talks with the Taliban

Clinton was much more prudent and careful than Kerry, whom one former State Department official describes as more of a “high-risk, high-reward”

“My view is that she was pretty sheltered,” he told me. “They were not interpersonally pleasant, and they were very protective of her. You can get into a cocoon.”

“My assessment was that she made a calculated political choice not to hang her hat on that thankless task,” Kim Ghattas,

the former secretary would have taken bolder risks but was reined in by the White House—especially during her first couple of years in office, when hostility from the bitter 2008 primary campaign still lingered between the Obama and Clinton staffs.

she actively engaged in Middle East talks, at one point meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for seven hours in New York.

Kennan warned Powell about the dangers of traveling too much—of prioritizing activist diplomacy over providing the White House with solid foreign-policy analysis.

Powell gave a copy of Kennan’s letter to Kerry. So far, Kerry is not following the advice. As October came to a close, Kerry had already flown more than 213,000 miles and spent more than 100 days—roughly 40 percent of his time—outside the United States. In his first nine months, he’d traveled more miles than Clinton had in her entire first year in office.

In 2009, he convinced Afghan President Hamid Karzai to consent to a runoff in his country’s disputed presidential election.

2011, he was dispatched to Pakistan after the killing of Osama bin Laden to persuade local officials to return the tail of an American helicopter that had crashed at the site.

cemented Kerry’s bond with Obama was less his diplomatic achievements than his ability to impersonate another tall, wealthy Massachusetts politician with good hair: Kerry served as Mitt Romney’s surrogate during weeks of preparation for the 2012 presidential debates.

Kerry channeled Romney so effectively that, aides to both men say, he got under Obama’s skin.

Kerry agreed that the U.S. should try to revive Middle East negotiations before the Palestinians again pushed for statehood, at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2013.

In private meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Obama pushed for a resumption of negotiations. At a final press conference before returning to Washington, Obama announced that he was handing the pursuit of talks over to Kerry.

“What I can guarantee is that Secretary Kerry is going to be spending a good deal of time in discussions with the parties.”

He met alone with Abbas for two hours in Amman and then flew to Jerusalem to meet with Netanyahu and three of his aides.

Kerry pressed on, returning in April to Jerusalem and Ramallah, the de facto Palestinian capital in the West Bank. After 24 hours of talks with both sides, Kerry held a press conference at the airport in Tel Aviv.

Kerry held three meetings with Netanyahu and Abbas in three days, including one meeting with the Israeli prime minister that lasted six hours, until 3 a.m. On June 29, he canceled a trip to the United Arab Emirates so he could keep talking with Netanyahu and Abbas, raising expectations of a breakthrough. On June 30, he held another press conference at the Tel Aviv airport.

“We started out with very wide gaps, and we have narrowed those considerably.”

Five months into the job, Kerry was off to an ominous start. His wife was in the hospital. Syria was convulsing. Progress toward Israeli-Palestinian talks was stalled. Egypt was burning. And Republican attack ads were making it appear as though the secretary of state had spent the weekend yachting.

Kerry said, according to the aide. “The only thing I’m interested in is a serious negotiation that can lead to a final-status agreement.”

“On behalf of President Obama, I am pleased to announce that we have reached an agreement that establishes a basis for resuming direct final-status negotiations between the Palestinians and the Israelis,” Kerry said, calmly and deliberately. “This is a significant and welcome step forward.” He declined to take questions.

Nine days later, the Israeli cabinet approved the release of the 104 Palestinian prisoners. The next day, Israeli and Palestinian officials arrived in Washington to begin peace talks.

The smallness of his circle of aides, which had been seen early on as a detriment to his management of the State Department, now made it easier to keep information contained.

Working with consultants from McKinsey, diplomats estimated that $4 billion in long-term private investment would flow to the Palestinians in the wake of an agreement.

Palestinian officials appear to have compromised on their demand for a settlement freeze.

From the beginning, Kerry had insisted that the Obama administration not allow a halt in Israeli settlement construction to become a public precondition.

Kerry also reiterated a core argument: the security that Israel currently enjoys is temporary, if not illusory. Without a two-state solution, Israel will face a European-led campaign of delegitimization, a new intifada, and a Palestinian leader far more radical than Abbas.

The crucial concession—the release of the 104 prisoners—came from the Israeli side

“It takes time to listen, it takes time to persuade,” Frank Lowenstein told me. “This is where Kerry’s willingness to stay up all night pays off.”

The U.S. provided nonlethal aid to the opposition, but White House officials were so fearful of American assistance inadvertently falling into the hands of jihadists that the National Security Council Deputies Committee monitored the distribution of the aid in granular detail. Qatar and Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, were funneling cash and weapons to hard-line militants, including Al Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda affiliate.

Russia continued providing Syria with arms and blocking any action by the UN Security Council.

When Putin finally received Kerry, after a three-hour delay, Putin reportedly fiddled continuously with his pen and “more resembled a man indulging a long-ago scheduled visit from the cultural attaché of Papua New Guinea than participating in an urgent summit with America’s top diplomat,”

At a late-night press conference, a beaming Kerry announced that he and Lavrov would co-host a peace conference in Geneva.

“They were great efforts, and again, I reiterate my gratitude to President Putin for a very generous welcome here.”

Earlier, in April, after American intelligence officials had confirmed that Assad had carried out several small-scale chemical-weapons attacks, Obama had reluctantly agreed to mount a covert CIA effort to arm and train moderate rebels.

if the United States did not “impose consequences” for Assad’s use of chemical weapons, the Syrian leader would see it as “a green light for continued CW use.” But the White House did not alter course.

Both Obama and Kerry favored a military response—air strikes—according to a senior administration official. As American intelligence agencies accumulated evidence suggesting that Assad was responsible, Kerry offered to make the public case for strikes. White House officials welcomed the idea and vetted his speeches.

“My vision is that, if you can make peace, if you can get Israel and Palestine resolved and can get the Iranian threat of a nuclear weapon put to bed appropriately—even if Syria didn’t calm down—if you get those two pieces or one piece of that, you’ve got a hugely changed dynamic in a region that is in turmoil. And if you take just the Palestinian-Israeli situation, you have the potential to make peace with 57 nations—35 Muslim nations and 22 Arab nations. If the issue is resolved, they will recognize Israel.”

not only divisions between Iran and the major powers that prevented a deal, but fissures within the negotiating group.

France objected strenuously that the proposed deal would do too little to curb Iran’s uranium enrichment or to stop the development of a nuclear reactor capable of producing plutonium.

“What I was looking for was the political determination, willingness and good faith in order to end this,” he said. “I think we’re all on the same wavelength, and that’s important.”

Iranian officials had promoted the possibility of a deal for days, generating an expectant atmosphere that swelled when Secretary of State John Kerry cut short a tour of the Middle East on Friday to join the talks. He was joined by the foreign ministers of Britain, France, Germany and Russia and a vice foreign minister from China.

“It takes time to build confidence between countries that have really been at odds with each other for a long time now.”

The proposal under consideration in Geneva was to have been the first stage of a multipart agreement. It called for Iran to freeze its nuclear program for up to six months to allow negotiations on a long-term agreement without the worry that Iran was racing ahead to build a bomb. In exchange, the West was to have provided some easing of the international sanctions that have battered Iran’s economy.

.Despite the diplomats’ insistence on progress, the failure to clinch an agreement raised questions about the future of the nuclear talks, given the fierce criticism that the mere prospect of a deal whipped up in Israel and among Republicans and some Democrats in Congress.

But the news was likely to be received with less enthusiasm by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s government

Furious government officials criticized the United States’ killing of the previous Taliban leader, Hakimullah Mehsud, in a drone strike last Friday, claiming that the Mr. Mehsud had been on the verge of starting peace talks that could end seven years of bloodshed in Pakistan’s major cities.

He set up a pirate radio station that broadcast jihadist propaganda across the valley, at one point urging women not to sleep with their husbands if they refused to join his jihad.

Mr. Sharif “bargained and sold out Hakimullah to the Americans,” he said.

Shahidullah Shahid, said there would be “no more talks as Mullah Fazlullah is already against negotiations.”

“This changes the entire equation,” said one senior government official in Peshawar.

For the Pakistani military, Mr. Fazlullah is a cherished enemy, too. He escaped the army’s toughest anti-Taliban offensive of recent years in 2009 when, as thousands of soldiers swept through Swat, following the collapse of a peace deal, he slipped through the dragnet and fled across the border into Afghanistan.

armed fighters displaced the civil government, instituting a authoritarian and often cruel rule that mandated public floggings, executions and the closure of girls’ schools.

But those compromises quickly foundered — there was public outrage across Pakistan over a video that showed Taliban fighters flogging a teenage girl in Swat — and by summer 2009, the army had moved in.

Mr. Khan has vowed to block NATO military supply lines into Afghanistan after Nov. 20 if the United States does not halt drone attacks in the tribal belt.

But Mr. Khan’s aggressive anti-American stance could be complicated by a fresh wave of Taliban violence — particularly if it is engineered by a Taliban leader who hails from the province that Mr. Khan controls.

The Pakistani Taliban is related to, but distinct from, the Afghan Taliban. The group has largely attacked targets inside Pakistan but has also deployed suicide bombers into Afghanistan and claimed responsibility for an attempted bombing of Times Square in May 2010. As a result, its leadership has been repeatedly targeted by American drones.

Why, it is fair to ask, does the killing of 100,000 or more with conventional weapons elicit little more than a concerned shrug, while the killing of a relative few from poison gas is enough to trigger an intervention

16 million people died and 20 million were wounded during World War I

2 percent of the casualties and fewer than 1 percent of the deaths are estimated to have resulted from chemical warfare

1925 Geneva Protocol, which banned the use, though not the possession, of chemical and biological weapons

almost universally accepted and become an international norm. Syria, too, is a signatory

No Western army used gas on the battlefield during the global slaughter of World War II

Nazis were to gas noncombatant Jews, Gypsies and others.

Franklin D. Roosevelt stepped in and, in quiet diplomacy, “told the Japanese that we knew of the use and that there would be consequences.”

general revulsion against the use of poisons against human beings in warfare, going back to the Greeks,”

1675, when France and the Holy Roman Empire agreed in Strasbourg not to use poisoned bullets

1899 not to use “projectiles the sole objective of which is the diffusion of asphyxiating or deleterious gases,

few known instances of poison gas being used since 1925

first two cases, gas was used by authoritarian regimes against those they considered lesser races.

1935-36, Mussolini used several hundred tons of mustard gas in Abyssinia, now Ethiopia

1940-41, the Japanese used chemical and biological weapons widely in China

chemical weapons have been categorized as “weapons of mass destruction,”

American use of Agent Orange in Vietnam was widely criticized

Iraq was the bad war and Libya was the good war and Afghanistan was the necessary war and Bosnia was the moral war and Syria is now another necessary war.

They are all the same war.

multisectarian societies, most of them Muslim or Arab, are held together for decades by dictators ruling vertically, from the top down

how the people in these countries respond to the fact that with the dictator gone they can only be governed horizontally

own social contracts for how to live together as equal citizens

without falling into Hobbes or Khomeini.

Saddam to Jefferson

“the army of the center.”

Iraq, we toppled the dictator and then, after making every mistake in the book, we got the parties to write a new social contract

“army of the center.”

Ditto Afghanistan.

Libya: No boots on the ground. So we decapitated that dictator from the air.

Hobbes took hold before Jefferson.

For any chance of a multisectarian democratic outcome in Syria, you need to win two wars on the ground: one against the ruling Assad-Alawite-Iranian-Hezbollah-Shiite alliance; and, once that one is over, you’d have to defeat the Sunni Islamists and pro-Al Qaeda jihadists.

both will be uphill fights.

The center exists

weak and unorganized

pluralistic societies

lack any sense of citizenship or deep ethic of pluralism

tolerance, cooperation and compromise

pluralistic society but lack pluralism

not without an army of the center to protect everyone from everyone.

not just poison gas, but poisoned hearts

self-governing, largely homogeneous, ethnic and religious units, like Kurdistan

modus vivendi, as happened in Lebanon after 14 years of civil war

smaller units will voluntarily come together into larger, more functional states.

“arm and shame,”

spare me the lecture that America’s credibility is at stake here. Really?

Their civilization has missed every big modern global trend

learning to tolerate “the other.” That struggle has to happen in the Arab/Muslim world

quality of local leadership and the degree of tolerance