War On Peace

Ronan Farrow, “War On Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence,” Norton & Co., 2018, 309 pp.

The theme of this book describes that even before 9/11/2001, and especially after, there has been a disproportionate flow of resources to achieve military solutions in international relations rather than pursuing diplomatic solutions, or at least maintaining a reasonable balance between the two.  American foreign policy has been separated from human rights concerns. With PresidentTrump, the process has accelerated and State Department jobs dealing with foreign-policy are increasingly being filled by military officers. 

My Notes:

Pg. xxii:  Over the course of the 1990s, the US international affairs budget tumbled by 30 percent (the peace dividend with the fall of the Soviets—this previous budget cut is about the same as Trump has now imposed).  The timing in the past could have hardly been worse.  With the disintegration of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, the US needed a slew of new outposts to stabilize the region and gain influence in spaces vacated by the Soviets.  So, by 9/11/2001 the State Department was short of staff, and those who remained were undertrained and under-resourced.  The US needed diplomacy more than ever, and it was nowhere to be found.

Pg. xxx:  The freefall of the Foreign Service has continued through both the Obama and Trump eras.  By 2012, 28 percent of overseas foreign officer slots were either vacant or filled by low-level employees working above their level of experience. 

Pg. 17:  A counter-insurgency or counterinsurgency (COIN) can be defined as "comprehensive civilian and military efforts taken to simultaneously defeat and contain insurgency and address its root causes," thus winning the population’s loyalty through social programs. Vietnam was the first modern test of American ‘counter-insurgency.’

Pg. 19:  The Paris peace talks with the Vietnamese was a dismal failure. It was later revealed that during the close 1968 presidential race, the Nixon campaign worked to scuttle the talks, encouraging South Vietnam to drag its feet by promising them a better deal when Nixon took office.*  (Later investigation found that President Johnson had bugged Nixon’s campaign plane).

*Politico Magazine, 9 June 2014, http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/yes-nixon-scuttled-the-vietnam-peace-talks-107623

Pg. 39:  The disintegration of Yugoslavia sparked an ethnic slaughter. By 1995, at least 100,000 people had been killed (maybe 300,000).  Efforts at mediation, including one led by Jimmy Carter, had barely interrupted Serbian forces aggressions against the region’s Muslims and Croats.  It was only after the July 1995 massacre of thousands of Muslim men and boys in the town of Srebrenica drew international outrage that the US shifted from its conviction that the violence was a European problem and green-lit a more aggressive diplomatic push.  The Dayton Agreement with Serbia was signed in 1995 with Richard Holbrooke as the US negotiator.

Pg. 41:  Even before the 9/11 attacks the CIA had collaborated with Pakistan in efforts to capture Osama bin Laden.  (He was finally caught in May 2011—found in Pakistan in an area comparable to the US West Point).

Pg. 70:  Since 1992, the Committee to Protect Journalists has documented sixty murders of reporters with motives related to their work in Pakistan.

Pg. 163:  Sidelining diplomacy in favor of direct dealings between our military and local warlords was at the heart of America’s declining fortunes in Afghanistan.  Similar choices contributed to the unleashing of new terrorist threats in the Horn of Africa.  And a policy built around strong-men left us flat-footed when revolution struck Egypt, and powerless to stop atrocities thereafter.   

Pg. 241:  There are thousands of stories in Columbia about the military’s practice of extrajudicial killings.  Under pressure from their commanders to create the appearance of success in the war against the guerrillas, members of the armed forces lured in unsuspecting civilians, killed them and dressed the bodies up as FARC rebels.  In 2015, the UN reported that the total number of victims of false positives could be as high as 5,000.  Each killing was rewarded with $1,500—a little less than half what the average Columbian took home each year.  The money for training these men came from the US.

Pg. 270:  Trump’s first budget proposed a 27 percent slash to the State Department’s funding—roughly $10 billion of the Department’s $52.78 billion budget.  The White House wanted to eliminate all funding for the US Institute of Peace and its mission to ‘guide peace talks and advise governments, train police and religious leaders, and support community groups opposing extremist.’  It would gut health programs on HIV, malaria, and polio, and halve the US contributions to United Nations peacekeeping missions.  It hoped to shutter the State Department’s Office of Global Criminal Justice, responsible for setting policy on war crimes.  More radically the administration sought to move the Bureau of refugee issues and consular affairs—responsible for the passport stamping and hostage extricating, that are perhaps the Department’s most recognizable core competency—out of State entirely and into the Department of Homeland Security.  Even the State Department’s mission statement was sized up for cuts.  The administration proposed removing ‘just’ and ‘democratic’ from the list of qualities the US sought to encourage around the world.  More than 1,300 diplomats would receive pink slips.  (In the same budget was the proposal for a $52 billion hike in defense spending. P. 273).

Pg. 280f:  Trump pulled out of the Iran deal.  He pulled out of the Paris Agreement on climate change making the US only the third country to shun it after Syria and Nicaragua, both of which later changed course and joined.  Trump then announced that he was canceling the last administration’s completely “one-sided” deal with Cuba although the Embassy would remain open.  Traveling to Cuba was again subject to more restrictions, again.

Pg. 292:  In international organizations, China is replacing the US as the US retreats.  As the US proposes cuts to its UN peacekeeping missions, China has become the second-largest funder.  As Trump abandoned the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a regional trade agreement that the Obama administration had led and nurtured since 2009, China swiftly stepped in with its own massive trade pact. 

Pg. 307:  If our interaction with other countries is only a business transaction, rather than a partnership with allies’ and friends, we will lose.  China practically invented transactional diplomacy, and if we choose to play their game, Beijing will run the table (Tom Countryman).

Addenda:

For this book, the author managed to interview every living secretary of state, up to and including Rex Tillerson.

In 2010, just before Thanksgiving, the United States government had gotten word that an outfit called WikiLeaks was preparing to release an enormous cache of secret diplomatic cables. At the time, the author was in the State Department and it fell to him and his colleagues to craft apologies on behalf of their bosses, “whose sensitive communications and private insults — speculation about, say, a foreign leader’s mental aptitude or mysterious wealth — were about to become public.”  Almost no one, however, anticipated one of the more lasting consequences of the leak: surprised admiration for American diplomats. “My personal opinion of the State Department has gone up several notches,” the British historian and journalist Timothy Garton Ash wrote. He compared one veteran ambassador’s prose to Evelyn Waugh’s, and deemed other analyses “astute,” “unsentimental” and “hilarious.”

“In many of America’s engagements around the world,” Farrow argues, “military alliances have now eclipsed the kind of civilian diplomacy that once counterbalanced them, with disastrous results.” He traces those results through fights over Afghanistan strategy, as well as through less prominent policy debates — like the case of a massacre by an American-backed Afghan militant (currently serving as his country’s vice president).

At the heart of Farrow’s book is the time he spent as an aide to the legendary diplomat Richard Holbrooke. Holbrooke was a larger-than-life figure, by his own willful design. Holbrooke’s place in history was already assured, thanks to his success in negotiating the Dayton peace agreement that had ended the war in Bosnia.  Yet, Holbrooke pursued a diplomatic resolution in the impossible environment of Afghanistan with little support from the ever-increasing reliance on a military solution.  When Holbrooke died suddenly in December 2010, his heart giving out after months of punishing travel, progress toward those talks had barely begun.

The author sees the rift that left Holbrooke out in the cold as about more than just personalities. Holbrooke set out to overcome what he characterized as “mil-think” — the military-driven logic that shaped the American approach to Afghanistan and Pakistan — and, no matter the administration’s supposed preferences, lost. The sidelining of Holbrooke, in Farrow’s analysis, was of a piece with a more general sidelining of diplomacy amid a continuing “militarization of foreign policy.” Holbrooke “had spent his final days alarmed at the dominance of generals in Obama’s Afghanistan review,” Farrow writes. Under Trump, this phenomenon was expanded “almost to the point of parody.”

The problem with “militarization” is not that military leaders are especially intent on using force. In fact, they are often more reticent than their civilian counterparts to resort to it, with those most implicated in fighting a war slower to advocate for one. The distortions are more subtle. Even when a stated policy aims to balance diplomatic and military concerns, how the message is delivered matters. If the diplomatic presentation comes via a State Department official who arrives alone, flying coach and rolling his own overnight bag, and the military presentation comes via a uniformed officer who arrives in his own airplane, with an entourage and eight or nine figures’ worth of security assistance in hand, it’s not hard to guess which is likely to come through more clearly to foreign leaders. And if investment in diplomatic tools is erratic and inadequate, those tools lose their effectiveness, giving policymakers little choice but to resort to military alternatives. Farrow lays out the vicious cycle: “American leadership no longer valued diplomats, which led to the kind of cuts that made diplomats less valuable. Rinse, repeat.”