War on Peace the End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence Reviews

A sobering cess of the Usa' floundering reputation.

The United States won its independence on the strength of an alliance with France negotiated by America's starting time great diplomats: Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and John Jay. The young journalist and one-time diplomat Ronan Farrow gives a nod to these Founding Fathers in the opening affiliate of his book, State of war on Peace, before turning to a critical business relationship of "the end of diplomacy" in post-Vietnam and mail-9/eleven U.S. foreign policy.

In Farrow's telling, U.S. foreign policy has been dominated by "mil think" at least since Vietnam, with the result that he labels in the subtitle equally "the decline in American influence."

Farrow himself saw the authorisation of military machine over diplomatic statecraft in his two years as an adjutant to the late Richard Holbrooke during Holbrooke's ill-fated tenure as the Usa' "special representative" to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The book ends, after Holbrooke's death, with a brief and sharply critical section on Donald Trump in the White House and Male monarch Tillerson on his way out as secretary of state. The White Firm is "crowded with armed services voices," Farrow writes. Holbrooke's "fear of militarization," he adds, "had come to pass on a calibration he never could have anticipated."

For Trump, diplomacy is not merely dead, but discredited. He withdrew from the Paris climate agreement and the Trans-Pacific Partnership in his first weeks in office even as he blustered against NAFTA and the six-ability nuclear deal with Iran. Farrow's judgment is blunt: Trump has "squandered diplomatic leadership."

The book reached stores just as Trump, in fact, withdrew from the Islamic republic of iran agreement to loud disapproval from the United States' European allies and most foreign-policy experts. Ironically, still, Trump was at the same time preparing for loftier-wire, one-on-one diplomatic negotiations with N Korea'south enigmatic leader, Kim Jong-un, aimed at coaxing the rogue regime into denuclearization.

Equally Trump himself might say, "We'll meet what happens."

Farrow devoted the first one-half of his book to a memoir of his role in the State Department human-rights position that he gained on the strength of a connection with Holbrooke from John Kerry'due south presidential entrada in 2004.

Holbrooke — "the closest thing to a male parent I had" — encouraged Farrow to keep a diary. The memoir has very much the feel of a diary: episodic vignettes filed with contemporaneous observations just elaborated with well-documented research into diverse sources, official and non-official.

Holbrooke achieved his greatest diplomatic triumph by brokering the Dayton agreement in 1995 that helped cease the Bosnian war after more than than three years. He hoped to banker the same sort of deal in Afghanistan between the U.S.-backed regime in Kabul and the Taliban, simply Washington squelched the idea of power-sharing with an Islamist faction hostile to Western ideas of democracy and human being rights and opted instead for a military "surge." Holbrooke was "sidelined," though not fired.

2 years into this role, Holbrooke fell ill while at Country Department headquarters and was taken to a nearby hospital for surgery to repair an aortic dissection. On the operating table, Holbrooke facetiously told the medico, "You've got to stop this war in Afghanistan." Farrow arrived at the infirmary but equally Holbrooke was taken off life back up.

Farrow'south account is too cursory and his perspective too limited to settle the issue of whether a peaceful reconciliation with the Taliban could have been achieved. He voices frustration with his own stepped-on role as liaison to human-rights groups.

He wrote memos about the extrajudicial killings — EJKs, in State Section usage — of Pakistani journalists trying to expose the Pakistani armed services and intelligence services. Only raising the upshot, Farrow learned, "was an uphill battle…some other fight not worth picking" as the The states was trying so hard to enlist its ostensible ally in counterterrorism operations.

At age thirty, Farrow has achieved stature and prominence beyond his years in both of his careers: diplomat and journalist. He was finishing his book even every bit he was digging upward the accounts of sexual harassment by the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein that won him the Pulitzer Prize.

The volume reflects indomitable shoe-leather reporting, equally well. Farrow scored interviews with every living former secretary of country, six of whom provided on-the-tape comments criticizing the severe budget-cutting imposed by the Trump administration with Tillerson's full back up.

Farrow gives Trump a pass of sorts by spreading the blame for "diplomats sidelined and soldiers and spies ascendant" dorsum to 2001. The book comes besides soon to provide a full, Bob Woodward-style examination of Trump's foreign policy, but 1 expects to read or see more from Farrow on the field of study in either of his journalistic homes: the New Yorker and NBC News.

Farrow's view is clear from his determination to entitle the final section, "Present at the Destruction," in wry contrast to Dean Acheson's magisterial memoir, Present at the Creation. The full extent of the harm remains to be seen.

Kenneth Jost, a graduate of Harvard College and Georgetown Law School, is author of Trending Toward #Justice, the annual series Supreme Courtroom Yearbook, and the legal affairs blog Jost on Justice. He wrote oft virtually U.Due south. foreign policy and international human rights issues as staff writer or contributor for CQ Researcher from 1994-2016.

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