When Obama somewhat reluctantly chose Kerry as his secretary of state, very few people — me included — expected to see the veteran senator go out on such a limb. He was, like Hillary Clinton, a professional politician who understands what the political marketplace will bear. He had spent decades patting the back and gripping the arm of Middle East autocrats. And, true to form, John Kerry blandly congratulated the generals who overthrew Egyptian President Mohamed Morsy for “restoring democracy” (though, to be fair, he became far more critical in the aftermath of their brutal assault on demonstrators). Until 2011, Kerry was the most prominent public figure in the United States calling for an end to the isolation of the Syrian regime.

I asked a number of friends and colleagues of Kerry how they made sense of this apparent contradiction. One State Department official told me, “I’ve been thinking about it for the last few days. There’s a little bit of Holbrooke” — Richard Holbrooke, the late, great American diplomat — “in terms of wanting to be at the center of great events.” Kerry, like Holbrooke a product of Vietnam and the Cold War, has the sense both of America’s primacy in the world and of his own. The same sense of moral urgency prompts Kerry’s quixotic quest for peace in the Middle East and his convictions on Syria. He supported military action in both Bosnia and Kosovo. “Kerry’s an interventionist,” says a long-time colleague. “He believes in the U.S. righting wrongs when we can.” He also has a deeply ingrained comfort level with somber men in dark suits which occasionally blinds him to the demands of the rabble beyond the walls.

Kerry also told me a few years back that he felt liberated by the fact that he knew he would not be president; he could do the right thing without having to everlastingly weigh the consequences. Barack Obama, of course, has no such luxury. Indeed, Kerry’s nonchalance about the political consequences of his words may be making the White House extremely anxious; I was struck by how eager State Department officials were to provide their boss’s version of events, perhaps to respond to the perception that he had slipped his leash.

It is also true that Kerry’s habit of dramatizing and personalizing his job may lead him to neglect everything that doesn’t feel like a supreme crisis. There’s a reason why you haven’t heard anything recently about that “pivot to Asia.”