Editor's note: David Rothkopf writes regularly for CNN.com. He is CEO and editor-at-large of the FP Group, publishers of Foreign Policy magazine, and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Follow him on Twitter.
On Monday, President Barack Obama's two secretaries of state inadvertently collaborated to shape an interesting twist in the Syria debate. Whether it proves to be more than just a footnote remains to be seen. But the development has added a glimmer of hope to a story that for the past two weeks has been an unrelenting mess for the White House and of deep concern to the American people.
The first move came from the current secretary of state, John Kerry. In a statement that was initially seen as a slip of the tongue (probably because it was), Kerry raised the possibility that if Syria were to give up its chemical weapons, an attack might be avoided. Although the administration almost immediately backed away from the statement and the British foreign secretary characterized it as impossible, the idea quickly began to gain traction.
Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moallem announced that his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov had proposed that Syria's chemical weapons be put under some form of international control as a way of forestalling a U.S.-led attack. Moallem went further, welcoming the initiative.
It turned out Kerry had spoken to Lavrov. And while Washington's first response was natural skepticism given the misrepresentations of the Syrian government in the past, it became clear that if there was any chance such an initiative could spare the president the political debacle of a failed vote in the Congress -- and possibly spare the country the costs of another military intervention in the region -- some in the administration felt it was worth considering.
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