John Kerry’s State Department
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

A story circulating in Washington, perhaps apocryphal, has it that late one evening during last year’s annual Munich Conference on Security Policy, after the day’s discussions were finished and a few drinks had been downed, Richard Holbrooke began a sentence by saying, “When John Kerry is president and I’m secretary of state and Nicholas Burns here is undersecretary of state for political affairs …” Mr. Kerry went on to lose the election, and Mr. Holbrooke, who was America’s ambassador to the United Nations under President Clinton and Mr. Kerry’s foreign policy adviser, is but a private citizen, albeit a distinguished one. Mr. Burns, however, emerged from his position as America’s ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to become just what that story had Mr. Holbrooke predicting, undersecretary of state for political affairs, with the surprise ending being that it’s in a Bush administration.
Mr. Holbrooke, relaying a message via his office, denies the yarn about the remark in Munich and says it “wouldn’t be appropriate” for him to have made such a declaration. But he is, his office says, “delighted” that the undersecretary is Mr. Burns, who “epitomizes the best in the foreign service.” In January, Mr. Holbrooke had written a glowing report in the Washington Post predicting that Mr. Burns would be in the new State Department team, which he described as “among the very best professionals of the current generation.” He said their foreign policy would be “more centrist, oriented toward problem-solving, essentially non-ideological, and focused on traditional diplomacy.” Mr. Holbrooke got almost all the appointments he predicted (and praised) correct – including Assistant Secretary Daniel Fried, Assistant Secretary C. David Welch, and Assistant Secretary Christopher R. Hill.
Such effusive praise of the Bush administration’s team for State from the man who would have most likely led the State Department in a Kerry administration (sorry, Senator Biden) tells a lot about the state of things in Foggy Bottom. President Bush won the 2004 election, a contest fought largely on foreign policy issues. Mr. Bush presented the platform for continuing America’s war on terror by tackling tyrannical regimes and democratizing the Middle East. Mr. Kerry ran on a platform of working “more with our European allies,” which the American people knew meant ignoring the British, Italians, and others who joined the war in Iraq, and instead making nice with the French and Germans. But the staffing hasn’t worked out the way the voters might have expected.
Instead, with a few exceptions, most notably John Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations and Condoleezza Rice as secretary, we’ve gotten a State Department of Kerry-ites. Mr. Burns, moreover, is unusually influential as the third-ranking officer in the department because Ms. Rice has been relentlessly globetrotting and her immediate deputy, Robert Zoellick, has been preoccupied with Sudan and China. And if there’s a tradition of bipartisan consensus in the foreign service and in American foreign policy overall, no one seems to have told Mr. Burns about it. The State Department is back to advancing its own agenda rather than the president’s – or, worse, counseling the president and influencing him in ways that pull him away from the policies he ran on.
Mr. Burn’s exact role in policy is hidden by State Department secrecy, but it’s visible in the Bush administration’s letting the E.U.-3 (Britain, France, and Germany) take the lead in handling Iran’s march toward the A-bomb. On Friday Mr. Burns was in London representing the administration in meetings with officials from Britain, France, Germany, and Russia to discuss Iran. Letting the E.U.-3 lead in dealing with Iran means policy is guided by the lowest common denominator of the three – Germany – whose policy is closely aligned to that of Russia, which is helping Iran build its nuclear program. Hardly surprising then that the E.U.-3’s dealing with Iran are all carrots and no sticks. We sense Mr. Burns’s hand as well in the Bush administration’s acceptance of President Mubarak’s election victory in Egypt – hardly a free or fair election. His influence is also seen in the Bush administration’s close relationship with Saudi Arabia and the deference with which it treats Yasser Arafat’s longtime sidekick, Mahmoud Abbas.
Mr. Burns has impeccable credentials for a Kerry administration official. He studied in France, earning the Certificat Pratique de Langue Francaise from the Sorbonne, and speaks French, Arabic, and Greek. He did a stint as spokesman for President Clinton’s first-term secretary of state, Warren Christopher, where his service included criticizing Mayor Giuliani for kicking Yasser Arafat out of a concert at Lincoln Center, saying that Mr. Arafat deserved to be treated with “respect, dignity, and hospitality.” Mr. Holbrooke’s praises of Mr. Burns as being among a group of diplomats who are “centrists” and “non-ideological” are no doubt spot on. He’s just not what the American people voted for, and when Mr. Bush returns from his gallivanting overseas the best thing he can do to redeem his commitment to voters is to do something about it.