by Ronan Farrow
If there was to be a road map for the future of American diplomacy, many career diplomats told me, it was this: embracing the compromise and imperfection of the deals, realizing that they could avert war and save lives; investing in working-level diplomats and giving them a long enough leash to do their jobs; and installing leadership with a visionary belief in large-scale diplomatic initiatives like the ones the Trump administration seemed bent on dismantling. Those proposals looked, in their way, not unlike the reforms that had reshaped State in the years after World War II.
“On Iran, Cuba, and Paris—I think it’s really, frankly, just three policies where whichever administration came in after us was handed a series of opportunities, big ones, and frankly had some diplomatic openings that past secretaries would’ve loved to have teed up to explore,” John Kerry said. The worst-case scenario of the Iran deal, he continued to believe as the Trump administration began its pushback, was that Iran would resist compliance, isolating the Iranians, not the Americans. The consequences of the United States unilaterally imploding the deal were, he argued, far worse. “Trump’s done it backwards, with bluster. He’s isolated us. If the [deal] goes belly up, the world will blame us not Iran. . . .” Kerry went for a jab: “If that’s the art of the deal, you can see why this guy filed for bankruptcy seven times.” It was a sound bite from another era, when you could shame someone into seeing the error of their ways; when a crystal-clear case, a sound argument, could make a difference. But, in American politics, that time had passed.
Ultimately, more than eighty arms control specialists signed a letter defending the Iran deal as a “net plus for international nuclear nonproliferation efforts” and warning that “unilateral action by the United States, especially on the basis of unsupported contentions of Iranian cheating, would isolate the United States.” But that message didn’t penetrate the Trump administration, which continued to publicly excoriate Iran. The time of specialists playing a formative role in foreign policy, some career officials feared, may have passed too. Just days after assuming power, the new administration had, of course, fired its top in-house expert on nonproliferation.
SO IT WAS THAT, on a cold Sunday in January 2017, Tom Countryman found himself clearing out his office at the State Department. It was the end of thirty-five years of service, but he was unsentimental. “There was so much to do,” he said with a shrug. “I’m not sure I pondered it.” On most Sundays, the Department was eerily empty. But on this one, Countryman wasn’t alone. Under Secretary Patrick Kennedy, after forty-four years in the Foreign Service, was cleaning out his desk as well. The two graying diplomats took a break from their boxes of paperwork and family photos to reminisce. Kennedy had been in the thick of the Iraq War as chief of staff for the Coalition Provisional Authority. Countryman had been in Egypt as that country joined the Gulf War. It was an improbably quiet end to a pair of high-stakes careers: memories and empty desks, as the State Department stood still.
A few days had passed since Countryman was fired while on a mission in Jordan, and he had done his best to wrap up what he could. There hadn’t been time to talk to most of his 260 employees in the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation. In any case, there was little to say that could provide clarity about what was to come.
The following Tuesday, he had one last chance to say goodbye. More than a hundred career officers crammed into a reception area on the first floor with a stained ceiling and industrial gray carpeting. The crowd clutched white Styrofoam cups as Countryman took to a podium. Since his firing less than a week before, Tom Countryman had become something of a minor celebrity, a symbol of an embattled profession. One colleague compared the end of his career to Obi-Wan Kenobi getting cut down by Darth Vader in Star Wars, which Countryman found touching. (Another, he added archly, compared it to the scene where Princess Leia strangles Jabba the Hutt. “And I found that confusing.”)
He had spent days thinking through a message, a lesson, something of worth to leave behind. Countryman was not, he told the crowd of beleaguered diplomats, disgruntled. He was, in fact, “probably the most gruntled person in the room.” He told them about a career that had given him a firsthand view of world and diplomatic history. He spoke of “ambassadors legendary” and of the bright young officers who, he was convinced, still rose from the ranks of the Foreign Service.
But he also sounded a warning. “A foreign policy without professionals is,” he said, “by definition, an amateur foreign policy.”
Stay, he urged the assembled officers—even as he acknowledged that theirs was a profession out of step with the times. “Our work is little understood by our fellow Americans, a fact that is sometimes exploited for political purpose.” Only they, he said, could serve as a bulwark against an increasingly transactional and militarized approach to the world. “Our consular officers are the first of many lines of defense against those who would come to the US with evil purpose. We want the families of America’s heroes—our servicemen—to know that their loved ones are not put into danger simply because of a failure to pursue nonmilitary solutions.. . . . If our interaction with other countries is only a business transaction, rather than a partnership with allies and friends, we will lose that game too. China practically invented transactional diplomacy, and if we choose to play their game, Beijing will run the table.”
These were the fears of the surviving diplomats who remembered a different time, when talking and listening counted for something, and the State Department was an indispensable instrument of American power. “We have unilaterally disarmed basically,” Wendy Sherman reflected. “If you don’t have diplomacy as a tool, you have unilaterally undermined your own power. Why would we do that?” She sighed. “Why we would take that away from ourselves is unfathomable to me and why we would become a military-first foreign policy is unfathomable to me.”
“There’s a real corrosion of the sense of American leadership in the world and the institutions that make that leadership real,” added Bill Burns. “You end up creating a circumstance where you wake up fifteen years from now and say ‘Where are all those Foreign Service officers who should be just short of the mark of becoming ambassadors?’ and they’re not going to be there.” He remembered vividly the “inversion” of diplomacy and military might he had witnessed during the run-up to the war in Iraq. As he watched the precious few diplomatic accomplishments of the modern era fall like dominoes under the Trump administration, he couldn’t help but see the parallel. “Diplomacy really ought to be the tool of first resort internationally. It can sometimes achieve things at far less cost, both financially and in terms of American lives, than the use of the military can,” Burns remarked. Some of the tilt toward military policymaking would be hard to undo, he conceded—but, he was convinced, there was always a path back. He still believed in the quality of Americans drawn to serve in his unglamorous but necessary line of work.
I was reminded of something Richard Holbrooke had written, as the State Department weathered the brutal budget cuts of the Clinton era, in the introduction of To End a War, his grand history of Bosnia and, of course, himself. “Today, public service has lost much of the aura that it had when John F. Kennedy asked us what we could do for our country. To hear that phrase before it became a cliché was electrifying.. . . . Public service can make a difference. If this book helps inspire a few young Americans to enter the government or other forms of public service, it will have achieved one of its goals.” Holbrooke was an impossible blowhard but his belief in America—and its power to make peace, not just war—was achingly earnest. After he died, I remember sitting at my cubicle, under the gray lights of the State Department’s first floor, staring at that passage, and thinking that, for all his faults, he had achieved that goal for the group of staffers he nurtured in Afghanistan. Years later, I pulled the volume off a shelf and opened it to the same dog-eared page, and realized that I had written in pencil along the margin: “miss you, Ambassador.”
As long as people continued
to believe in civilian public service, Burns felt, the institutions would survive. “The Foreign Service has often gotten the shit beaten out of it,” he observed, sounding, for the first time, undiplomatic. It had always survived before. This time, he and virtually all of his peers agreed, it had to. “In a world where power is more diffuse. . . . in which there’s so much that’s in flux, that actually makes diplomacy far more important and far more relevant than it ever was before, contrary to the fashionable notion that with information technology, ‘who needs embassies?’ ”
Tom Countryman was among those out of fashion. After his speech, he packed his bags and took a vacation. So it was that I caught up with him, sucking down e-cigarettes and looking out at the wide blue Puget Sound from his brother’s modest one-story house in Tacoma, Washington. Several months later, I asked Brian Hook, the first policy planning director at State during the Trump era, what he would identify as that administration’s signature diplomatic mission. Hook thought for a moment, as if turning over the question for the first time. In later conversations, he mentioned a broader range of priorities, including confronting ISIL. But in that first exchange, he said, finally: “nonproliferation around dangerous states like Iran and North Korea.” At the time, there was no one in charge of those issues at the State Department. For the following year, the job Tom Countryman once held would sit empty, like so many others.
ILLUSTRATIONS
Junior political officer Thomas Countryman reviews cables (and models an early prototype of his celebrated mullet) at his desk at the US embassy in Belgrade in 1985. (COURTESY OF THOMAS COUNTRYMAN)
Countryman, then principal deputy assistant secretary of state for politicalmilitary affairs, surveys landmine removal efforts in Afghanistan in May 2010. (STATE DEPARTMENT PHOTO)
Robin Raphel—then Robin Lynn Johnson—shares a moment with two of her students at Damavand College for Women, around 1971. (COURTESY OF ROBIN RAPHEL)
Raphel boards a Pakistani army helicopter after a visit to the site of a planned dam in Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan, in October 2010. (COURTESY OF JONATHAN PECCIA)
Raphel takes notes as Richard Holbrooke has a pensive moment during a breakfast with Pakistani parliamentarians at the Serena Hotel in Islamabad in 2010. “He’s a classic bully,” Raphel recalled of Holbrooke. “But I liked him because he wanted to get something done and was right-minded and wasn’t a wuss.” (COURTESY OF MORGAN J. O’BRIEN III)
Richard Holbrooke, as was so often the case, with a book in hand, during his early years as a Foreign Service officer in southeast Asia in 1963. (COURTESY OF KATI MARTON)
From left: Christopher Hill, who would later go on to lead North Korea talks; Secretary of State Warren Christopher; Holbrooke; President of Bosnia and Herzegovina Alija Izetbegovic; and Serbian President Slobodan Miloševic pore over maps of disputed territory in Holbrooke’s quarters at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base during the Dayton negotiations in 1995. (COURTESY OF KATI MARTON)
Richard Holbrooke and his Office of the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan (SRAP) team in the courtyard of the State Department in 2009. To his immediate right are me, communications director Ashley Bommer, and scholars Barnett Rubin and Vali Nasr. (COURTESY OF MORGAN J. O’ RIEN III)
From left: Holbrooke, SRAP military liaisons Colonel Doug Rose and Colonel Brian Lamson, and I meet with General William B. Caldwell (pictured from behind), the commander of the NATO training mission for Afghan forces, in Kabul in 2010. (COURTESY OF MORGAN J. O’BRIEN III)
Husain Haqqani, at the time the spokesperson for Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, looks on as Bhutto delivers remarks in Islamabad in 1994, in a photo she later signed for him. (COURTESY OF HUSAIN HAQQANI)
Haqqani whispers in Richard Holbrooke’s ear as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announces aid projects at Pakistan’s foreign ministry, in Islamabad, in 2010. “He was frustrated,” Haqqani recalled of Holbrooke’s outlook that year. “He was frustrated with the fact that for some people, it was less important to get things done, and more important who did them.” (AP PHOTO / B.K. BA GASH)
Human bones litter the freshly bulldozed earth in a photo taken by John Heffernan minutes after he and fellow Physicians for Human Rights investigator Dr. Jennifer Leaning discovered the mass grave in Afghanistan’s Dasht-i-Leili desert in January 2002. The area, Leaning recalled, smelled “rotten, messy, foul,” like “disturbed garbage.” (JOHN HEFFERNAN / PHYSICIANS FOR HUMAN RIGHTS)
Dr. Jennifer Leaning interviews detainees at Sheberghan prison in northern Afghanistan in January 2002. “They were very sick,” she said, “very thin.” (JOHN HEFFERNAN / PHYSICIANS FOR HUMAN RIGHTS)
General Abdul Rashid Dostum and US Special Forces meet with surrendered Taliban and al-Qaeda detainees at Sheberghan prison on December 1, 2001. (COPYRIGHT ROBERT YOUNG PELTON)
General Dostum looks on as one of his beloved deer thrashes in the receivin hall of the Vice Presidential Palace in Kabul, in August 2016. (PHOTO BY RONAN FARROW)
General Dostum (right) prepares to host a match of kurash, a Central Asian martial art, at the Vice Presidential Palace in Kabul in August 2016. I take notes (center), wearing a traditional Uzbek chapan, or cloak, for the occasion at Dostum’s request. (COURTESY OF THE OFFICE OF VICE PRESIDENT DOSTUM)
Thomas Evans (left, then sixteen years old), his mother Sally (center), and his brother Micheal (right, then fourteen) pose for a picture at Trafalgar Square in London in 2006, long before Thomas left home. Thomas was “very caring,” Sally remembered. “I’ve no idea how he became that person he became.” (COURTESY OF MICHEAL EVANS)
After delivering a speech on youth and democracy in February 2012, Hillary Clinton looks out at the Mediterranean from a Tunisia newly roiled by revolution and skeptical of American alliances in the region. (PHOTO BY RONAN FARROW)
Protestors hold up a tear gas canister manufactured by Jamestown, Pennsylvania-based Combined Systems Inc. and used by Egyptian security forces against crowds of civilians during the Rabaa massacre in Cairo in August 2013. (COPYRIGHT TEO BUTTURINI)
Freddy Torres prepares for another long haul in the cab of the Chevrolet Isuzu FRR he uses to transport fruit, including tamarillos and lulos, across Colombia in 2018. (COURTESY OF FREDDY TORRES)
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson (center) talks to former Secretaries George P. Shultz (right) and Condoleezza Rice (left) at an event at Stanford University in January 2018. (STATE DEPARTMENT PHOTO)
Christopher Hill (left) and Richard Holbrooke (right) pal around on one of their many flights to Belgrade as they worked toward a negotiated end to the Bosnian War in September 1995. Hill recalled “learning the trade from Holbrooke, like an apprentice watching a master carpenter.”(COURTESY OF CHRISTOPHER HILL)
Christopher Hill dons a hazardous materials suit and enters the Yongbyon nuclear power plant in North Korea in the fall of 2007. The regime in Pyongyang had begun deactivating and dismantling the plant, abiding by the terms of the six-party talks that Hill led. (COURTESY OF CHRISTOPHER HILL)
Secretary of State John Kerry and the team of American diplomats behind the Iran deal (left) negotiate with Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif and the Iranians (right) in the Palais Coburg’s Blue Salon in Vienna in 2015. (STATE DEPARTMENT PHOTO)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I CONDUCTED OVER two hundred interviews for War on Peace. I owe much to the sources whose eyewitness accounts, documents, and insights run through every page. Some of your names I may never be able to make public. For every one of you who spoke, sometimes at personal or professional risk: thank you. To the career diplomats, especially—Tom Countryman, Erin Clancy, Robin Raphel, Anne Patterson, Bill Burns, Christopher Hill, Chris LaVine, and too many others to list here—I hope this book is a fitting examination of the work you do. I hope it is the same for Richard Holbrooke and his complicated and important legacy. Without him, this book wouldn’t exist.
I am equally grateful to the secretaries of state who were gracious enough to go on the reco
rd: Henry Kissinger, George P. Shultz, James Baker, Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Rex Tillerson. They were generous with their time and their candor. The same thanks go to the other military and civilian leaders who spoke: David Petraeus, Michael Hayden, Leon Panetta, John Allen, James Stavridis, William Caldwell, and many others.
Shana Mansbach, my indefatigable research assistant, was involved in hundreds of hours of interviews, proofing, and footnoting. She refused to drop the project, even when it ran longer than anticipated, and she had better damn things to do. She was preceded by the wonderful Arie Kuipers and Nathan Kohlenberg. All of us were given a safety net by Andy Young, my meticulous fact-checker, who made time to review manuscripts while being a full-time traveling companion to Lady Gaga, for some reason.