Published in the distant days of 2018, War on Peace is an insider account of the collapse of American diplomacy by diplomat turned journalist Ronan Farrow. Before he brought down Harvey Weinstein, Farrow worked for Clinton alley and bureaucratic bulldozer Richard Holbrooke on the thorny issue of peace in Afghanistan during the first Obama administration. Farrow's job was coordination with NGOs, but what he really got was a front-row seat to the exercise of power. Through a series of vignettes, focusing mostly on Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the American diplomats who worked there, Farrow weaves a story about the ruin of soft power that reached a crescendo with the mass firings of senior State Department officials under Donald Trump, but reaches back decades earlier, possibly to the immediate aftermath of the highpoint of turning the WW2 Allies into the United Nations and founding NATO, and definitely to the Bush administration.

The basic problem that Farrow identifies is that State has allowed its bailiwick of diplomatic engagement to wither in favor of direct ties between the US military and foreign partners, the shadow wars of the CIA, the data-driven wiretapping of the NSA, and the presidential access of the National Security Advisor. Which means that when it comes time to talk, to trying and build consensus and 'win the peace', there's no one with the expertise and authority to do it.

Pakistan is Farrow's emblematic case. Pakistan has been an American client since the Soviet War in Afghanistan, where the CIA's covert aid was directed entirely through the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence. The ISI cultivated its own clients, who evolved into the Taliban. And when Pakistan became a crucial ally in the wake of 9/11, the relationship became fractally dysfunctional. As murky as American objectives were in Afghanistan, they were beholden to Pakistan's geographic grip on the ground lines of communication, and sovereignty over border regions that the mujahideen fighters used. Billions of dollars in aid flowed to Pakistan, and when American diplomats asked for progress on other issues, like democracy, human rights, and nuclear non-proliferation, the answer was a shrug: "Do you really care about those things, or do you care about your war?"

Repeatedly, American patronage of strongmen reversed the expected power dynamic. American policy could only advance through the actions of local leaders, who were often unpopular and sustained solely by American aid. Yet abandoning these strongmen, whatever their flaws, would mean chaos. And so America became identified with and reliant on warlords profoundly antithetical to stated American values in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sudan, Egypt, Colombia, etc etc.

There are fair bureaucratic reasons for this. When the President gives an order to the military or the CIA, odds are something will happen. The same order given to State will result in a discussion. When the domestic 24 hour news cycle is what drives Washington, the slow and halting work of negotiation is both unsatisfying and presents the possibility for awkward news cycles. All recent administrations have participated in the process. Trump's Twitter driven foreign policy was novel more in its speed and random nature than it's uncoupling from the experts at State.

Broadly, I agree with Farrow's assessment that America should be more open in who it talks to, and exercise much more discretion in who it pays. There are hard questions to be asked about what level of past atrocities block an individual or organization from receiving American support, as well as what can be overlooked among America's friends in terms of corruption and violence, and this book doesn't really have the answers.

What I can say is that at a remove, American diplomacy is likely cooked. Since 9/11, we've lost or burnt out an entire generation of public servants. I don't think there's anyone like Holbrooke left at State, the kind of robust Kennedy-esque liberal who really did believe in "Asking what they could do for their country". Anyone with ideals and skills has either quit or gone into hiding, leaving the ticket-punchers and careerists.

What are the consequences? Well, I can only close with a quote from a Statecraft interview with DARPA officer Eric Van Gieson on Ebola response.

Q: When you were on the ground, how did our engagement in Africa stack up with Chinese and Russian engagement? Did you cross paths?

Yeah. There's an example of where we were waiting to go in to meet with an African delegation. I won't name the country, but our team was prepared to speak in French — we had translators. And we got half an hour with the delegation from their Ministry of Health. We walked out, and the Chinese delegation came in, but they went to the effort of not only knowing French, but also knowing a local language that none of us had ever heard, and they spoke in that language to their hosts. We were ushered out. The Chinese stayed for three hours.

Cutting diplomacy is penny-wise, pound foolish. This is what it sounds like when an empire falls.