Timothy Carney, a career diplomat who died at 82, spent his life insisting that understanding the world required inhabiting it — even its most dangerous corners. His most consequential stand came in the late 1990s, when he argued against closing the U.S. embassy in Khartoum at the very moment Osama bin Laden was building his networks there. His objection was overruled, but the question he raised — whether presence in perilous places is a form of wisdom rather than recklessness — has never fully been answered.