As secretary of state, John Kerry shrugged his shoulders as Syrian President Bashar Assad slaughtered hundreds of thousands of civilians. As President Joe Biden’s climate envoy, his legacy has become worse.

Put aside the hypocrisy: “It’s the only choice for somebody like me,” he said when asked about his use of a private jet to collect an award for activism in Iceland in 2019. That hypocrisy has continued during Kerry’s current tenure. He jets around the globe to have conversations he could have as productively had via a video call. But what will define Kerry’s legacy and, by extension, Biden’s, is Kerry’s willingness to make moral compromises for the sake of an autocrat’s ephemeral though unenforceable promises.