Read War on Peace The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence Thorndike Press Large Print Popular and Narrative Nonfiction Ronan Farrow 9781432859343 Books

Product details Series Thorndike Press Large Print Popular and Narrative Nonfiction Library Binding 681 pages Publisher Thorndike Press Large Print; Large Print edition (January 9, 2019) Language English ISBN-10 143285934X

War on Peace The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence Thorndike Press Large Print Popular and Narrative Nonfiction Ronan Farrow 9781432859343 Books Reviews

• This is an outstanding book. It is very well written and provides substantial detail about many of our diplomatic efforts in the last twenty plus years as well as the dramatic decline in the Foreign Service. Farrow devotes many pages to the unsuccessful efforts of Richard Holbrooke to achieve some sort of diplomatic success in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Farrow worked at the State Department and served under Holbrooke whom Farrow admired but also considered very difficult and his own worst enemy. Farrow details many of the military efforts in Afghanistan that caused more problems than they solved, including support of territorial war lords. The inescapable conclusion is that our efforts there have failed which, ironically, is underscored by an Inspector General's report that was just issued.
  
  Farrow describes the increased emphasis placed by our government on military efforts rather than diplomacy and the way it has caused problems in such places as Somalia.
  
  Farrow's account of the virtual decimation of the State Department under Tillerson underscores the difficulty we will have in the future conducting serious diplomacy.
• War on Peace” is a riveting and thought-provoking book exploring the reasons behind the declining, though one hopes not dying, art and craft of US foreign diplomacy negotiation. Ronan Farrow, former US State Department diplomat and current journalist, details how the use of diplomacy has diminished over the last several presidencies, at the hands of ever increasing military power that is now used by the US as a replacement to foreign diplomacy. This trend started under President Reagan, continued through President George W. Bush, and was heavily favored by President Obama and is now carried on by the current administration. Now with key diplomatic positions unfilled in the State Department, and with a quarter of the its budget slashed, it seems that US diplomacy may be on life-support, if perhaps for the foreseeable future. Instead Farrow shows how military might (and the threat of it), and the military industrial complex seem to rule US international relations more and more, often supporting despotic rulers who pay lip service to US interests, but often actually secretly act in ways counter to US interests.
  
  Farrow has done meticulous research for his book. He interviewed over 200 key players, including all living former US Secretaries of State, numerous career diplomats, and military officials. Clearly his access helps give his book tremendous weight. His close work with the late Richard Holbrook, the legendary diplomatist, is masterfully portrayed in this book — as a man whose skills are of a time past and was significantly under-appreciated and under-utilized at the time of his death.
  
  Still Farrow was a young diplomat (at his time of service), and so I sometimes felt that his book’s conclusions about some diplomatic decisions, now portrayed through his eyes as a young journalist, were sometimes too judgmental. He may have felt the outcomes were only too obvious, but in hindsight only which is what he forgets. The decisions were not always clear at the time of negotiation; the reality of diplomacy is that it is usually intensely complex and clear-cut answers aren’t always evident or possible. Compromise must happen and only time will reveal that certain decisions may have been right or wrong ones, even when they might all appear positive at the time.
  
  I also think that Farrow could have been a little more objective in his approach. He admires Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who administration he worked under. Yet he doesn’t mention at all under her watch the foreign policy disasters of the Embassy bombing in Libya or the email scandal that ultimately sank her own bid for the presidency. I suspect those two events also harmed the credibility of the State Department in many ways as well, something he should have explored more to present a fuller picture leading to the current State Department.
  
  This book was truly amazing though. I could hardly put it down, it was that good. Because of it, I found myself dwelling pondering the state of US diplomacy over the last many presidencies. I’m a strong believer in diplomacy, and hope that someday diplomacy will again ascend to its rightful place as the primary tool of foreign negotiation.
• I never expected to pick up a non-fiction book on this topic and have it read like a novel. Farrow's writing is nuanced, fluid and full of first person anecdotes that bring color and immediacy to all the situations he describes.
  
  Combining careful research and analysis with first person interviews, Farrow illustrates the direction the United States government has taken over the past few decades in valuing militarism, devaluing diplomacy, and the disappointing and dire consequences for having done so.
  
  His accounts of where diplomacy has worked are realistic, not overly rosy. He portrays diplomacy as a messy, difficult, process, carried out by flawed human beings, and fraught with compromises that often do not leave the parties involved fully satisfied. And yet, the alternative--force--is clearly worse and, in the long run, does not seem to work to make either the US or any other place in the world safer. In fact, the opposite is mostly true.
  
  From reading this book, I got the impression that diplomats are often forced into positions of having to tolerate and even condone a certain amount of militarism. Farrow can't help but wonder if Democrats and Republicans valued diplomatic efforts more than these Pyrrhic proxy wars (and if the State Department and USAID were fully funded so as to be staffed with experienced and dedicated career diplomats, with a deep knowledge of the part of the world they were addressing, combined with their having sophisticated negotiating skills), if conditions here and abroad would not be so much better. Instead, over the years, and especially now, the State Department and USAID are being gutted of skilled, career professionals in favor of militarism and "might makes right."
  
  According to Farrow, this gutting of State, while seeming to reach its apex with Trump, was moving in that direction under other heads of state, such as Clinton, Bush and Obama. Farrow implies that Obama somewhat redeemed himself during his second four years with the Paris Accord, Iran Deal, and rapprochement with Cuba, all of which might be reversed under Trump. Farrow quotes Secretary John Kerry, who worked tirelessly on the Iran deal, as saying about Trump's threat to kill it, "If that's the art of the deal, you can see why this guy went belly up seven times."
  
  A quote by Cicero in the Epilogue sums up this thoughtful read There are two types of military dispute, the one settled by negotiation and the other by force. Since the first is characteristic of human beings and the second of beasts, we must have recourse to the second only if we cannot exploit the first.
  
  Farrow's tone is measured but left me wishing that my country could move away from the direction of beasts.