Eli Lake, Columnist

Kerry Brokers Trump’s Plan for Syria

The administration and the Republican candidate seem to think we can trust, or at least deal with, Russia.

September 11, 2016 at 2:55 PM UTC

Eli Lake is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering national security and foreign policy. He was the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast and covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI.

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Photographer: Sameer al-Doumy/AFP/Getty Image

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If Donald Trump wins the presidential election in November, he might want to make Secretary of State John Kerry his special envoy for U.S.-Russian cooperation in the war on terror. While the men disagree on many things -- from the Iran deal to the provenance of the Islamic State -- their Syria policy is on the same page.

Just look at the cease-fire Kerry says he reached in Geneva on Friday night with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov. If a cessation of violence holds for a week, then Kerry has committed -- over the overt skepticism of the Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence community -- to work with Russia's air force to target al-Nusra, the jhadist group that only recently claimed it was no longer al-Qaeda’s franchise.