War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence. Ronan Farrow
are deepened, inevitably, during times of war. “When the country is at war, it shifts to the White House and the Pentagon,” Condoleezza Rice told me. “And that, I think, is also natural.” Rice reflected a common thinking across multiple administrations: “It’s a fast-moving set of circumstances,” she argued. “There isn’t really time for the bureaucratic processes … it doesn’t have the same character of the steady process development you see in more normal times.”
But, by the time the Trump administration began hacking away at the State Department, it had been nearly twenty years since “normal times” in American foreign policy. This was the new reality with which the United States had to contend. Rice’s point—that the aging bureaucracies shaped during the post–World War II era moved too slowly for times of emergency—was often true. But ruthlessly centralizing power to avoid broken bureaucracies, rather than reforming them to do their jobs as intended, conjures up a vicious cycle. With State ever less useful in a world of perpetual emergency; with the money, power and prestige of the Pentagon dwarfing those of any other agency; and with the White House itself filled with former generals, the United States is leaving behind the capacity for diplomatic solutions to even make it into the room.
“I remember Colin Powell once said that there was a reason the occupation of Japan was not carried out by a Foreign Service officer but by a general,” Rice remembered. “In those circumstances, you have to tilt more to the Pentagon.” But just as the occupation of Japan being carried out by a Foreign Service officer registered as an absurdity, the negotiation of treaties and reconstruction of economies being carried out by uniformed officers was a contradiction, and one with a dubious track record.
THE POINT IS NOT that the old institutions of traditional diplomacy can solve today’s crises. The point is that we are witnessing the destruction of those institutions, with little thought to engineering modern replacements. Past secretaries of state diverged on how to solve the problem of America’s crumbling diplomatic enterprise. Kissinger, ever the hawk, acknowledged the decline of the State Department but greeted it with a shrug. “I’m certainly uncomfortable with the fact that one can walk through the State Department now and find so many offices empty,” he said. Kissinger was ninety-four when we spoke. He slouched on a royal blue couch in his New York office, staring at me from under a brow creased with worry lines. He appeared to regard the problems of the present from immense distance. Even his voice, that deep Bavarian rasp, seemed to echo across the decades, as if recorded in Nixon’s Oval Office. “It is true that the State Department is inadequately staffed. It is true that the State Department has not been given what it thought was its due. But that is partly due to the fact that new institutions have arisen.” But by the time I interviewed Kissinger, during the Trump administration, there were no new institutions emerging to take the place of the kind of thoughtful, holistic foreign policy analysis, unshackled from military exigencies, that diplomacy had once provided America.
Hillary Clinton, sounding weary about a year after she lost her 2016 presidential campaign, told me she’d seen that shift coming for years. When she took office as secretary of state at the beginning of the Obama administration, “I began calling leaders around the world who I had known in my previous lives as a senator and a first lady, and so many of them were distressed by what they saw as the militarization of foreign policy in the Bush administration and the very narrow focus on the important issues of terrorism and of course the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I think now the balance has tipped even further toward militarization across the board on every kind of issue,” she said. “Diplomacy,” she added, expressing a common sentiment among former secretaries of state, both Republican and Democrat, “is under the gun.”
These are not problems of principle. The changes described here are, in real time, producing results that make the world less safe and prosperous. Already, they have plunged the United States deeper into military engagements that might have been avoided. Already, they have exacted a heavy cost in American lives and influence around the world. What follows is an account of a crisis. It tells the story of a life-saving discipline torn apart by political cowardice. It describes my own years as a State Department official in Afghanistan and elsewhere, watching the decline play out, with disastrous results for America, and in the lives of the last, great defenders of the profession. And it looks to modern alliances in every corner of the earth, forged by soldiers and spies, and to the costs of those relationships for the United States.
In short, this is the story of a transformation in the role of the United States among the nations of our world—and of the outmatched public servants inside creaking institutions desperately striving to keep an alternative alive.
PAKISTAN, 2010
If you ain’t speakin’ money language I can’t hang
You know your conversation is weak, so it’s senseless to speak
—DR. DRE, EVERYDAY THING (WITH NAS AND NATURE)
THE DIPLOMAT WAS NOT always an endangered species. Those who hold the profession in reverence point out that it once flourished, upheld by larger-than-life, world-striding figures whose accomplishments still form the bedrock of the modern international order. Stories of diplomacy are a part of the American creation myth. Without Benjamin Franklin’s negotiations with the French, there would have been no Treaty of Alliance and no naval support to secure American independence. Without Franklin, John Adams and John Jay brokering the Treaty of Paris, there would have been no formal end to war with the British. Had Adams, a Massachusetts Yankee of modest upbringing, not traveled to England and presented his credentials as our first diplomat in the Court of King George III, the new United States might have never stabilized relations with the British after the war. Even in the nineteenth century, when diplomats barely made living wages and Congress saddled the State Department with a slew of domestic responsibilities from maintaining the mint to notarizing official documents, the Department defined the modern map of the United States, brokering the Louisiana Purchase and settling disputes with Britain over the border with Canada. Even after the First World War, as the nation turned inward and grappled with the Great Depression, American secretaries of state orchestrated the Washington Naval Conference on disarmament and the Pact of Paris, renouncing war—forging bonds that were later integral in rallying the allies against the Axis powers.
American politicians have forever exploited a vein of nationalism and isolationism against the work of foreign policy. One late nineteenth-century congressman accused diplomats of “working our ruin by creating a desire for foreign customs and foreign follies. The disease is imported by our returning diplomats and by the foreign ambassadors sent here by monarchs and despots to corrupt and destroy our American ideals.” He suggested confining diplomats on their return from assignments, “as we quarantine foreign rags through fear of cholera.” But great diplomatic accomplishments always cut through that hostility.
This