by Ronan Farrow
Over the course of his presidency, Barack Obama approved more than double the dollar value of arms deals with foreign regimes than George W. Bush had before him. In fact, the Obama administration sold more arms than any other since World War II. When I pressed Hillary Clinton on those facts, she seemed taken aback. “I’m not saying it was perfect,” she told me. “As you made out, there were decisions that had increased military commitments associated with them.” In the end, however, she felt the Obama administration had gotten “more right than wrong,” when it came to the militarization of foreign policy. She cited, as an example, the emphasis on diplomacy that accompanied the Afghanistan review in which she participated. But that review was held up, by both State Department and White House officials, as a deep source of regret and an acute example of the exclusion of civilians from meaningful foreign policymaking. In secret memoranda sent directly to Clinton as that process unfolded and made public in these pages, the diplomat Richard Holbrooke, ostensibly the president’s representative on Afghanistan, decried a process overtaken by, in his words, “pure mil-think.”
THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION also doubled down on the kind of White House power grabs that had frustrated Powell during the Bush administration. From Obama’s first days in office, Jones, the national security advisor, pledged to expand the National Security Council’s reach. What was disparagingly referred to as “back-channel” communication between the president and cabinet members like the secretary of state would be constrained. Jones’s successors, Tom Donilon and Susan Rice, each ratcheted up the level of control, according to senior officials.
Samantha Power, who served as director for multilateral affairs and, later, in Obama’s cabinet as US ambassador to the United Nations, conceded that there were “some fair critiques” of the administration’s tendency to micromanage. “It was often the case,” she recalled, that policies made at anything but the highest tiers of the White House’s hierarchy, “didn’t have the force of law, or a force of direction. People weren’t confident it wouldn’t get changed once it went up the White House chain.” We were holed up in a shadowy, exposed-brick corner of Grendel’s Den, a bar near Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where she was a professor. Power, the one-time bleeding-heart war reporter and professor of human rights law, had won a Pulitzer Prize for her book on America’s failure to confront genocide around the world. She had long been a favorite subject of awed, inadvertently sexist journalistic paeans, which often began in the same way. Power “strode across the packed room and took a seat, her long sweep of red hair settling around her like a protective shawl,” the New York Times offered. She was “ivory-toned, abundantly freckled and wears her thick red hair long,” added the Washington Post. “Her long red hair,” Vogue agreed, was “striking against the UN’s hopeful sky-blue backdrop.” Samantha Power’s hair, through little fault of her own, shimmered its way across a decade of profiles until, finally, the feminist blog Jezebel pleaded, “Enough With Samantha Power’s Flowing Red Hair.” Power had a winning earnestness and a tendency toward authentic rambling that had, on occasion, made her a PR liability. She memorably called Hillary Clinton a “monster” during the 2008 presidential campaign. She said “fuck” a lot.
“The bottleneck is too great,” she continued, “if even very small aspects of US foreign policy have to get decided at the deputies’ and principals’ level in order for it to count as policy.” Denis McDonough, Donilon’s deputy and, later, White House chief of staff, would chastise senior officials who attempted to, as he put it, “color outside the lines,” according to two who received such rebukes. Susan Rice, according to one senior official, exerted even tighter control over policy related to virtually every part of the globe except Latin America. Rice pointed out that every administration struggles with questions of White House micromanagement. “That is ever the charge from the agencies,” she said, “and I have served more time in the State Department than I have in the White House in my career. I’m very familiar with both ends of the street. Find me an agency that feels like the White House isn’t up in their knickers and I’ll be amazed and impressed.”
But some career State Department officials said the Obama administration had gotten the balancing act wrong more often than previous administrations. Examples abounded. Policymaking on South Sudan, which was elevated to a “principals” level under Obama, often stalled when Secretary of State John Kerry or Secretary of Defense Ash Carter were unavailable to join meetings due to their numerous competing obligations. Lower-level officials were disempowered to fill the void. Meetings would be canceled and rescheduled, and weeks would be lost, with lives hanging in the balance. That, Power conceded, “should have been at best a deputies process, because, given inevitable bandwidth constraints, it was very unlikely to be sustained as a principals’ process.”
The centralization of power had a withering effect on capacity outside of the White House. “The agencies got habituated to always be coming back and asking for direction or clearance,” she reflected, as a waitress slid a plate of curry in front of her. She doused it with a shocking amount of sriracha sauce, which makes sense if you’re ordering curry at a bar. “The problem,” she continued, “is that central control, over time, generates something like learned helplessness.” The defiant, world-striding scholar-stateswoman sounded, for a moment, almost wistful. “I think people in other agencies felt that they couldn’t move.”
THE KINDS OF WHITE HOUSE CONTROL exerted by Presidents Trump and Obama were, in some ways, worlds apart. Where one administration closely micromanaged agencies, the other simply cut them loose. “In previous administrations,” Susan Rice argued, the State Department “struggled in the rough and tumble of the bureaucracy. Now, they’re trying to kill it.” But the end result was similar: diplomats sitting on the sidelines, with policy being made elsewhere.
The freefall of the Foreign Service has continued through both the Obama and Trump eras. By 2012, 28 percent of overseas Foreign Service officer slots were either vacant or filled by low-level employees working above their level of experience. In 2014, most officers had less than ten years of experience, a decline from even the 1990s. Fewer of them ascended to leadership than before: in 1975, more than half of all officers reached senior positions; by 2013, just a quarter did. A profession which, decades earlier, had drawn the greatest minds from America’s universities and the private sector was ailing, if not dying.
Every living former secretary of state went on the record for this book. Many expressed concern about the future of the Foreign Service. “The United States must conduct a global diplomacy,” said George P. Shultz, who was ninety-seven by the time we spoke during the Trump administration. The State Department, he argued, was stretched too thin and vulnerable to the changing whims of passing administrations. “It was ironic, as soon as we had the pivot to Asia, the Middle East blew up and Russia went into Ukraine. . . . So you have to conduct a global diplomacy. That means you have to have a strong Foreign Service and people who are there permanently.”
Henry Kissinger suggested that the arc of history had emaciated the Foreign Service, skewing the balance further toward military leadership. “The problem is whether the selection of key advisers is too much loaded in one direction,” Kissinger mused. “Well, there are many reasons for that. For one thing, there are fewer experienced Foreign Service officers. And secondly, one could argue that if you give an order to the Defense Department there’s an 80 percent chance it’ll be executed, if you give an order to the State Department there’s an 80 percent chance of a discussion.” Those imbalances in usefulness are deepened, inevitably, during times of war. “When the country is at war, it shifts to the White House and the Pentagon,” Condoleezza Rice told me. “And that, I think, is also natural.” Rice reflected a common thinking across multiple administrations: “It’s a fast-moving set of circumstances,” she argued. “There isn’t really time for the bureaucratic processes . . . it doesn’t have the same character of the steady pro
cess development you see in more normal times.”
But, by the time the Trump administration began hacking away at the State Department, it had been nearly twenty years since “normal times” in American foreign policy. This was the new reality with which the United States had to contend. Rice’s point—that the aging bureaucracies shaped during the post–World War II era moved too slowly for times of emergency—was often true. But ruthlessly centralizing power to avoid broken bureaucracies, rather than reforming them to do their jobs as intended, conjures up a vicious cycle. With State ever less useful in a world of perpetual emergency; with the money, power and prestige of the Pentagon dwarfing those of any other agency; and with the White House itself filled with former generals, the United States is leaving behind the capacity for diplomatic solutions to even make it into the room.
“I remember Colin Powell once said that there was a reason the occupation of Japan was not carried out by a Foreign Service officer but by a general,” Rice remembered. “In those circumstances, you have to tilt more to the Pentagon.” But just as the occupation of Japan being carried out by a Foreign Service officer registered as an absurdity, the negotiation of treaties and reconstruction of economies being carried out by uniformed officers was a contradiction, and one with a dubious track record.
THE POINT IS NOT that the old institutions of traditional diplomacy can solve today’s crises. The point is that we are witnessing the destruction of those institutions, with little thought to engineering modern replacements. Past secretaries of state diverged on how to solve the problem of America’s crumbling diplomatic enterprise. Kissinger, ever the hawk, acknowledged the decline of the State Department but greeted it with a shrug. “I’m certainly uncomfortable with the fact that one can walk through the State Department now and find so many offices empty,” he said. Kissinger was ninety-four when we spoke. He slouched on a royal blue couch in his New York office, staring at me from under a brow creased with worry lines. He appeared to regard the problems of the present from immense distance. Even his voice, that deep Bavarian rasp, seemed to echo across the decades, as if recorded in Nixon’s Oval Office. “It is true that the State Department is inadequately staffed. It is true that the State Department has not been given what it thought was its due. But that is partly due to the fact that new institutions have arisen.” But by the time I interviewed Kissinger, during the Trump administration, there were no new institutions emerging to take the place of the kind of thoughtful, holistic foreign policy analysis, unshackled from military exigencies, that diplomacy had once provided America.
Hillary Clinton, sounding weary about a year after she lost her 2016 presidential campaign, told me she’d seen that shift coming for years. When she took office as secretary of state at the beginning of the Obama administration, “I began calling leaders around the world who I had known in my previous lives as a senator and a first lady, and so many of them were distressed by what they saw as the militarization of foreign policy in the Bush administration and the very narrow focus on the important issues of terrorism and of course the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I think now the balance has tipped even further toward militarization across the board on every kind of issue,” she said. “Diplomacy,” she added, expressing a common sentiment among former secretaries of state, both Republican and Democrat, “is under the gun.”
These are not problems of principle. The changes described here are, in real time, producing results that make the world less safe and prosperous. Already, they have plunged the United States deeper into military engagements that might have been avoided. Already, they have exacted a heavy cost in American lives and influence around the world. What follows is an account of a crisis. It tells the story of a life-saving discipline torn apart by political cowardice. It describes my own years as a State Department official in Afghanistan and elsewhere, watching the decline play out, with disastrous results for America, and in the lives of the last, great defenders of the profession. And it looks to modern alliances in every corner of the earth, forged by soldiers and spies, and to the costs of those relationships for the United States.
In short, this is the story of a transformation in the role of the United States among the nations of our world—and of the outmatched public servants inside creaking institutions desperately striving to keep an alternative alive.
PART I
THE LAST DIPLOMATS
PAKISTAN, 2010
If you ain’t speakin’ money language I can’t
hang You know your conversation is weak, so it’s senseless to speak
— DR. DRE, EVERYDAY THING (WITH NAS AND NATURE)
1
AMERICAN MYTHS
THE DIPLOMAT WAS NOT always an endangered species. Those who hold the profession in reverence point out that it once flourished, upheld by larger-than-life, world-striding figures whose accomplishments still form the bedrock of the modern international order. Stories of diplomacy are a part of the American creation myth. Without Benjamin Franklin’s negotiations with the French, there would have been no Treaty of Alliance and no naval support to secure American independence. Without Franklin, John Adams and John Jay brokering the Treaty of Paris, there would have been no formal end to war with the British. Had Adams, a Massachusetts Yankee of modest upbringing, not traveled to England and presented his credentials as our first diplomat in the Court of King George III, the new United States might have never stabilized relations with the British after the war. Even in the nineteenth century, when diplomats barely made living wages and Congress saddled the State Department with a slew of domestic responsibilities from maintaining the mint to notarizing official documents, the Department defined the modern map of the United States, brokering the Louisiana Purchase and settling disputes with Britain over the border with Canada. Even after the First World War, as the nation turned inward and grappled with the Great Depression, American secretaries of state orchestrated the Washington Naval Conference on disarmament and the Pact of Paris, renouncing war—forging bonds that were later integral in rallying the allies against the Axis powers.
American politicians have forever exploited a vein of nationalism and isolationism against the work of foreign policy. One late nineteenth-century congressman accused diplomats of “working our ruin by creating a desire for foreign customs and foreign follies. The disease is imported by our returning diplomats and by the foreign ambassadors sent here by monarchs and despots to corrupt and destroy our American ideals.” He suggested confining diplomats on their return from assignments, “as we quarantine foreign rags through fear of cholera.” But great diplomatic accomplishments always cut through that hostility.
This was never more true than during World War II, when the Department adapted to the challenges of the day and gave rise to the most fruitful period of diplomatic accomplishment in American history. The State Department faced an existential crisis then not unlike the one that unraveled in 2017. “The American nation desperately needs and desperately lacks an adequate State Department at this hour of the shaping of its future,” screamed the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1943 copy that would splice neatly into coverage of Trump’s secretaries of state generations later. But the response was a world apart: Between 1940 and 1945, the Department modernized and reformed. It tripled its workforce and doubled its budget. It restructured, creating offices to address long-term planning, postwar reconstruction and public information in an age of fast-changing mass media.
That modernized State Department, led by a new generation of hard-charging diplomats, shaped a new international order. Those years saw the forging of a great wartime alliance between the United States and the United Kingdom, brokered by Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. The same era brought about the creation of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, negotiated between the United States, Canada, Western Europe, Australia, and Japan. It produced the “containment” doctrine that came to define US engagement with the Soviets for decades to come. Among the prominent architects of
this era were six friends, later celebrated as “the Wise Men.” Two, George Kennan and Charles Bohlen, were members of the Foreign Service, the, at the time, newly formed professional organization for diplomats. In the postwar years, the Wise Men guided President Truman to what would become the Truman Doctrine, committing the United States to support other nations against the Soviets and to the massive Marshall Plan for international assistance to those nations. The same timeframe yielded the creation of NATO, championed by another member of a rejuvenated State Department, Under Secretary Robert Lovett.
The era of the Wise Men was far from perfect. Some of their most celebrated ideas were also fonts of blunder and misery. Despite Kennan’s warnings, for example, containment was appropriated as a rationale for the military escalation and conflict that came to define the Cold War. “As much as I love reading Present at the Creation,” John Kerry said of Dean Acheson’s densely detailed 800-page memoir of his time at the State Department, “Maybe history and some distance tells us that Acheson and Dulles made some mistakes out of a certainty and a view of the world that we paid for a long time, certainly in some places? In my generation, Richard Holbrooke and I both knew that the supposed best and the brightest got plenty of our friends killed in Vietnam.”
But the Wise Men had undeniable success and staying power in stabilizing the world. And diplomats of their stature, and the kind of old-school diplomacy they practiced, seem harder to find today than seventy years ago, or fifty, or twenty. “Is it the person or the role or the times?” Kerry wondered. “I see some really first-rate diplomats who have done great work. . . . Maybe we just don’t celebrate people in government and at State the way we once did?”
Henry Kissinger argued that a broader shift had taken place: that something had changed not simply in the State Department and its relative bureaucratic influence, but in the philosophy of the American people. It was not lost on me that I was sitting across from someone with a more complicated legacy than even the Wise Men: regarded in some circles as an exemplar of the ferocious diplomat, and in others as a war criminal for his bombing of Cambodia. (It wasn’t lost on him either: he attempted to end our interview when I approached subjects of controversy.) This may have been why Kissinger tended towards the general and the philosophical. Tactics, he felt, had triumphed over strategy, and fast reaction over historicized decision-making. “The United States is eternally preoccupied with solving whatever problems emerge at the moment,” Kissinger said. “We have an inadequate number of experienced people in the conduct of foreign policy but even more importantly, an inadequate number of people who can think of foreign policy as a historical process.”