When John Kerry succeeded Hillary Clinton as secretary of state in February, Clinton’s emotional departure from the State Department received blanket media coverage. Kerry’s arrival received next to none.

“So here’s the big question before the country and the world and the State Department after the last eight years,” Kerry said in a speech to State Department employees on his first day on the job. “Can a man actually run the State Department? I don’t know.”

As the crowd roared with laughter, Kerry pushed the joke too far.

“As the saying goes,” he said, “I have big heels to fill.”

Nearly three weeks later, Kerry’s first foreign-policy speech as secretary, an hourlong defense of diplomacy and foreign aid, was a flop. The Washington Post gave it 500 words. The New York Times ignored it. (He was also accused of accidentally inventing a new country called “Kyrzakhstan,” an apparent conflation of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.)

The nearly universal expectation was that Kerry’s tenure would be overshadowed by his predecessor’s, for a long list of reasons. For starters, he was arriving in Foggy Bottom when the country seemed to be withdrawing from the world. Exhausted by two long wars, Americans were wary of ambitious new foreign engagements – certainly of military ones, but of entangling diplomatic ones, too.

President 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.

Kerry hadn’t even been Obama’s first choice for the position, getting nominated only when the candidacy of United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice was derailed by her tenuous association with the Benghazi-consulate tragedy in 2012. (Rice ended up running the National Security Council.) The appetite for risk taking in the White House is never high, but after the Benghazi imbroglio, it was particularly low.

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.

Yet his time at the State Department has been anything but boring – and no one can argue his lack of relevance. 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; hammered out a new post-withdrawal security agreement with Afghan President Hamid Karzai; and is trying to reach a nuclear deal with Iran.

Some of these initiatives seemed to begin almost by accident; all of them could still go awry; any of them could blow up in Kerry’s face. His critics say that even if these initiatives don’t collapse, they may do more to boost Kerry’s ego than to increase geopolitical stability. But when the history of early-21st-century diplomacy gets written, it may well be Kerry who is credited with making the State Department relevant again.

Kerry’s critics take a less charitable view, saying his gaffes are caused by arrogance and indiscipline. They say that even in a city swollen with egotism and pomposity, Kerry stands out. To mention Kerry’s name among jaded Washington-establishment types is to elicit rolling of eyes; a word that comes up frequently in conversations about Kerry is “gasbag.”

Kerry’s efforts may fail. The Israeli-Palestinian peace talks could founder. Assad could continue to slaughter his opponents with conventional weapons. Iran, after using negotiations to forestall an American or Israeli military strike, might announce that it has completed the building of a nuclear weapon. Unforeseen events could create greater challenges. And Kerry’s fierce desire for visible success might compel him to allow parties to sign small-bore agreements that provide cover for our adversaries rather than truly historic compromises that stabilize the region.

But Kerry grasps the Middle East’s central challenge: a looming demographic explosion that will cause instability to metastasize unless economic growth is radically accelerated. His activism is not the neoconservative sort, nor even the sort typically associated with liberal interventionism; he is not proposing to transform the region through ground invasions or revolution from afar, and he is generally wary of even limited military engagement.

But patient, opportunistic diplomatic engagement – days, months and years of listening and cajoling, leveraging and negotiating – is another matter. If adversaries can be brought to the negotiating table and given clear incentives, then dynamics can change, and salutary developments might occur. Or so the secretary of state believes.

Kerry’s vigorous diplomacy may be driven by arrogance. It may be driven by idealism. It may be driven by having nothing left to lose. And of course it may fail. But the status quo in the Middle East is leading only toward chaos, if not cataclysm. Haven’t we reached the point where assertive, risk-taking diplomacy is called for?

Maine native David Rohde is a columnist for Reuters and a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for reporting in Bosnia and Afghanistan.