Who could have known Ronan Farrow would develop into such a remarkable thinker? He credits his mother, of whom he speaks with genuine awe in his voice. Not only has 30-year-old Ronan Farrow been a diplomat, in his early twenties working closely with Richard Holbrooke, special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan in the midst of American’s longest war, but just last year he broke the story published in The New Yorker which set America on a new trajectory for gender relations.
War on Peace is an examination of American foreign policy in the last two decades, though Farrow occasionally wanders further afield to highlight a trend or to stress a break in continuity. Did we have a foreign service in the past two decades that was not consumed by military matters? Believe it or not, we had a robust diplomatic core who was toiling away unsung, trying to wrest decision-making from generals focused on anti-terrorism and counter-insurgency. Richard Holbrooke was one of these.
Holbrooke wasn’t well-liked in Washington, but was effective in his role in the Bosnia peace talks. He was hard-headed, obsessive, egotistical. He’d wanted to be Secretary of State during President Clinton’s administration but the job went to Madeleine Albright. He was Secretary of State Clinton’s choice for envoy to the Afghanistan war zone. It was a bum job, but Holbrooke was happy to get it. Ronan knew Holbrooke as a family friend and was invited onto Holbrooke’s team. We get a view of Holbrooke from someone who knew his gifts and his faults.
Ronan has a disarmingly frank manner. For this book he interviewed on the record every living Secretary of State, and just about every other Washingtonian who had anything to do with international work. What he charts herein is the militarization of the diplomatic corps, starting way back in Bill Clinton’s presidency through Bush and Obama, neither of whom did anything to slow or halt the trend. Farrow does talk about the current president, but only to highlight how diplomacy has become a dirty word in D.C.
Most interesting for me was the access that Farrow had in talking about American foreign policy in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and how we never seemed to actually get anywhere. In Pakistan especially we never seemed able to take advantage of cooperation with the people who could bridge the trust gap. Farrow makes it sound like we were so close to better, more cooperative relations but the ship of state is hard to steer. Our relationships with other countries tended to impact our relations in Pakistan, to say nothing of the assassination of Bhutto, the misuse of aid funds, and bin Laden living in hiding there.
Farrow gives some idea how DJT is playing in Europe at the moment, as if we didn’t know. He quotes Merkel's dry and damning statements about "we really should all be trying harder to work out problems with our allies..." But when this 30-yr-old says we must stay engaged in the leadership of the world because if we don’t, someone else will, we understand and we believe him. When Clinton said this during the campaign, actually answering a question I’d posed about America’s role in the world, I was resistant. I am still working through disappointment that she couldn’t manage to make even her countrymen want her to be that leader.
Our dysfunctional relationship with Colombia is spelled out in painful detail. How stupid and disrespectful has America ever been in South America? America’s war on drugs became a sordid saga of the U.S. training drug runners. Towards the end of Farrow’s book, this story is just so sobering and souring. Perhaps we come off looking like the buffoons we are because of the unending corruption in every single South American country. It is just exhausting and hard to believe an honest person cannot rise to the top anywhere in South America. But we just keep playing out the worst examples of bad behavior, on both sides of the border.
In the end this book is an impassioned call to young people to create the change they want to see. Farrow is trying to gin up some enthusiasm for a diplomatic corps who can think, talk, and make treaties around the world rather than militarize our relationships. It is obviously true that if you start with a gun in your hand you are going to have a very different mindset about solving disagreements. Diplomacy is long, frustrating, and often useless seeming…until it isn’t.
Great book. The inside scoop on how the Department of State functions is worth the price of admission. I listened to the audio of this, read by Farrow himself and it was terrific. Produced by Audible.
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