War on peace: the end of diplomacy and the decline of American influence

Ronan Farrow is an investigative journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize for his role in the exposure of Harvey Weinstein. He is also a former State Department official who began as an intern for Richard Holbrooke, one of America's great diplomats, though one with great flaws. The central theme of War on peace is the laying to waste of the State Department under successive presidents and the consequent shift in power to the White House and to the Pentagon.

The book opens with the sacking in January 2017 of Tom Countryman, a career diplomat and expert on arms control. Countryman was working on a mission on non-proliferation in the Middle East when he was abruptly informed that his services were no longer required. He was a victim of the Mahogany Row purge—so called after the seventh floor corridor of the State Department which contains the Secretary of State's office—together with many other career officials, fired without notice. Some units, including the one dealing with North Korea, were abolished, while a number of ambassadorships remain unfulfilled and recruitment is at an all-time low.

The evisceration of the department began, Farrow argues, not with Donald Trump, but with Bill Clinton in the 1990s. The mantra, ‘it's the economy stupid’, together with the supposed peace dividend following the end of the Cold War, legitimized cuts of around 30 per cent in the department's budget, similar in size to those made by Rex Tillerson in 2017. George W. Bush and Barack Obama also downgraded the department, though both came to recognize their mistake, and began to row back during their second terms. The cuts made by the Trump administration were unprecedented only in the sense of representing a new extreme. But Farrow ponders whether the damage has now gone so far as to be irreversible. He cites the fear of senior Democratic Senator Ben Cardin that, while Dean Acheson had been present at the creation, the Trump administration will be present at the destruction of the world order that American diplomats created in the 1940s.

Farrow is by no means a cheerleader for the department, accepting that there is much wrong with it, and that its bureaucracy can be slow and stultifying. But he believes diplomacy has a crucial role to play in resolving international disputes and protecting Americans against terrorism. He contrasts the disdain for diplomacy shown by recent presidents with the response of Franklin Roosevelt during the Second World War when the department faced a similar existential crisis. Instead of downgrading it, Roosevelt chose to modernize and reform. America, in consequence, achieved real diplomatic gains in the postwar years under Harry Truman—including NATO, the Marshall Plan and a collective response in Korea. This fruitful era in American diplomacy was led by empowered diplomats or The wise men, so labelled by Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas in their 1986 book of that name (New York: Simon and Schuster)—Dean Acheson, Chip Bohlen, Averell Harriman, George Kennan, Robert Lovett and John McCloy. The Trump administration, by contrast, seeks to dismantle diplomatic achievements—the Iran nuclear deal, the Paris climate change accords and improved relations with Cuba. It is a paradox that a president who prides himself on being the ultimate deal-maker has so undermined the very machinery needed to ensure those deals. The art of the deal, after all, requires more diplomacy, not less.

The State Department has always been an easy target, since its work, though necessary, is unglamorous. It has no electoral constituency prepared to fight for it. The military, by contrast, enjoy strong congressional and public support. The result has been the militarization of diplomacy. Some core responsibilities of the department have now been transferred to the Pentagon. Yet the Pentagon has a different role and different objectives. The Pentagon and the State Department work best together when there is a balance of power between them. The relegation of diplomacy under the Trump administration has had a serious effect on relationships with allies, who now doubt America's trustworthiness, and it has weakened the country's role as a promoter of democracy and human rights.

Farrow uses Afghanistan, where he worked with Richard Holbrooke, as a case-study. Holbrooke believed that the Afghan conflict had echoes of Vietnam, in that no military solution was possible. Therefore, a political settlement was needed. Holbrooke believed that he could achieve such a settlement, just as he had done against seemingly impossible odds in Bosnia. But neither the White House nor the Pentagon would listen to him, and he died with his mission unfulfilled.

War on peace is based on the author's deep inside knowledge of the State Department and over two hundred interviews, including interviews with every living Secretary of State, all of whom went on the record. The interview with Tillerson is particularly revealing, showing how out of his depth the former CEO of ExxonMobil was when he came into government. His failure to defend the department's budget led to the firing of over 1,300 diplomats in addition to the Mahogany Row purge, while new hiring was frozen.

War on peace does not claim to be a work of scholarship, but it makes a powerful case that there has been a fundamental transformation in how America relates to the world. It is an important book whose lessons on the value of diplomacy are by no means confined to the United States.