War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence

by Ronan Farrow

There was dialogue in the hopes of future dialogue, which is easier to mock than to achieve.

Around the world, uniformed officers increasingly handled the negotiation, economic reconstruction, and infrastructure development for which we once had a devoted body of trained specialists.

As a result, a different set of relationships has come to form the bedrock of American foreign policy. Where civilians are not empowered to negotiate, military-to-military dealings still flourish. America has changed whom it brings to the table, and, by extension, it has changed who sits at the other side. Foreign ministries are still there. But foreign militaries and militias often have the better seats.

Bill Clinton ran on the promise of domestic reinvestment—it was, as Clinton’s strategist James Carville noted in a statement that became the indelible brand of their campaign, “the economy, stupid,”—and quickly set about slashing America’s civilian presence around the world.

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION SCRAMBLED to reinvest. “We resourced the Department like never before,” then–secretary of state Colin Powell recalled. But it was growth born of a new, militarized form of foreign policy.

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,

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.

“It’s one great American myth,” Kissinger added, speaking slowly, “that you can always try something new.”

“You need to be engaged and figure out what makes people tick and what motivates them,” she said. “To me that’s blindingly obvious.” She reflected on this for a moment. “But sometimes we forget. And in this post-9/11, more urgent and demanding time, we fell into finger-wagging demanding.”

The US had helped create Pakistan’s state sponsorship of militant Islam in that era, and now it couldn’t put the genie back in the bottle.

These kinds of broader conversations were, they felt, someone else’s problem. But because the power within the US policy process was so skewed away from civilian leadership, it was hard to know who could meaningfully raise such issues.

We have not been talking about the grand strategic issues that the two nations should be talking to each other about.” Another Pakistani military official who was present while we spoke nodded vigorously. “Nobody is asking questions of what makes Pakistan do what it does,” that second official added.

Explicitly militarizing the contract language was new—and, it turned out, tone-deaf. The nongovernmental organizations applying for the contracts revolted. The

Yet again, timelines dictated by military exigencies and domestic political pressures didn’t fit with the realities of diplomacy and development.

amounts of financial, intel, training, infrastructure and logistics assistance, and we felt it was going very well.” Holbrooke seemed buoyed. Despite the obstacles, he told me, he was edging toward something important. 12

Whether it was part of a deal or a natural consequence of the strain the incident had put on the relationship, the agency quietly began pulling dozens of its undercover operatives out of Pakistan.

But by early 2018, the South and Central Asia Bureau still didn’t have a permanent assistant secretary. If someone was actively championing diplomatic solutions for the region, it wasn’t apparent.

Diplomats were no longer losing the argument on Afghanistan: they weren’t in it. In

At the State Department in late May 2017, a reporter asked Acting Assistant Secretary of State Stuart E. Jones—a career Foreign Service officer in a post to which no permanent appointee had been nominated—how the administration reconciled a record-setting $110-billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia with that regime’s abysmal human rights record. Jones sighed heavily. “Um. Um . . .” he muttered, glancing around, knitting and re-knitting his fingers. Then he froze for twenty seconds, his face slackened into a thousand-yard stare. He offered a few halting sentences about fighting extremism and another interminable pause before hurrying offstage, head down, like he’d realized he was naked in a dream. AGAIN AND AGAIN, President Trump called authoritarian strongmen to sing their praises.

Military proxy wars replacing diplomacy in the region had been “completely corrosive” from a strategic standpoint, said LaVine.

But I had not come to tell the tale of General Dostum, or at least not in the way General Dostum seemed terrifyingly assured I would. I had come to Dostum’s grass-carpeted palace in Kabul to ask about an unmarked grave at the ends of the earth.

What happened to the missing prisoners? How did these men and boys end up in such a tomb, in such a place? And, a question no one inside the US government wanted to touch for more than a decade after: What did Americans on the ground know and see as the earth was moved and the grave was filled with body after body? We made a deal with Dostum for the territory he could take for us, for the blood he could spill of enemies we shared. What was the price? What did we give up when we shook his hand? How did all the talk of smaller footprints and partner forces hold up against a femur sticking out of the dirt? These were familiar ethical quandaries in America’s national-security-sensitive alliances. But, like the smell in the desert, they had become unusually hard to ignore here.

America’s objectives in Afghanistan had turned from conquest to development. But the diplomatic muscle had atrophied.

“The literal obstruction of investigation and suppression of information by [the US government].” My inability to cut through that indifference weighed on me. When I set out for Kabul, years later, I was determined to come back with answers.

This was General Dostum as seen by himself, or at least how he hoped reporters like me would see him: a misunderstood champion of his people. He was an animal lover who wept over injured deer. A warlord with a heart of gold. The people’s warlord!

Nevertheless, the United States, gripped with fear that Somalia might become the next Afghanistan, threw its weight behind a succession of local fighting forces with the intention of ousting the ICU. Not long after the decision to arm Dostum and his fellow commanders, the CIA set to work building a similar set of alliances with Somalia’s warlords. Later, when those alliances backfired spectacularly and galvanized support for the ICU, the Pentagon turned to the Ethiopian military, backing an invasion that scattered the leaders of the courts to cities like Asmara, leaving behind radical elements and hastening the rise of the terror group al-Shabaab.

BUT THE UNITED STATES military and intelligence communities became bent on toppling the courts. Direct intervention was a political nonstarter, in the shadow of the Black Hawk incident. And so, another covert proxy war took form. By 2004, the CIA was quietly approaching warlords perceived to be secular and offering them alliances in exchange for counterterrorism cooperation.

Still, once Frazer and others in the diplomatic chain of command became aware of the alliances with the warlords, they began defending them. Diplomatic cables from 2006 describe a policy of using “non-traditional liaison partners (e.g., militia leaders)” in Somalia to “locat[e] and nullif[y] high value targets.” Diplomats who pushed back on the use of the warlords were quashed quickly. Michael Zorick, a political officer at the US embassy in Nairobi, filed a dissent cable on the subject and was promptly reassigned to Chad, a move that was widely perceived as punishment for asking too many questions.

They had the project that they embraced, and didn’t want to be adversely affected in any way.” He picked up his coffee again. “And that’s how superpowers behave.” Alemu took a sip and smiled.

The largely unarmed protesters, he suggested, were a menace to public safety. This was the influence America’s most muscular diplomatic intervention—and an annual military assistance package totaling $1.3 billion—had purchased: at best, a few extra words, behind closed doors, shortly before the slaughter.

When those autocrats’ regimes crumbled and the alliances with them became a liability, the United States was slow to adapt. In the Middle East, as in Central Asia, military-to-military deals had eclipsed diplomacy for so long, we barely knew how to do anything else. Egypt was Exhibit A.

But, from the revolts of 2011 to the Rabaa massacre in 2013, when change swept the region, it betrayed fatal flaws in that conventional American wisdom. Buying security wasn’t enough. Years of neglected diplomacy meant that Washington lacked other, essential tools of persuasion when conflict broke out.

The most militarized corners of American foreign policy were also among the most constrained, so much so that one of the most obvious coups in recent history could never be called what it was.

Meanwhile, years of dependence on military assistance had convinced both sides that arms and equipment sales were the only currency that could purchase influence, and that diplomatic overtures were essentially cosmetic.

tear gas canister, one of many picked up off the bloodied concrete by numb survivors. Several appeared to be American-made. One he photographed bore the logo of CTS—Combined Tactical Systems—a Jamestown, Pennsylvania–based arms manufacturer. It even had a support contact number, with a Pennsylvania area code that, presumedly, an Egyptian would have to call during business hours to lodge a complaint. Butturini never forgot the shouts of the protesters around him, brandishing the empty canisters: “They’re shooting at us, the tear gas, and the tear gas comes from the USA.”

The uncomfortable question US officials seldom confronted was the extent to which American support elevated those militaries to their status as the only lasting structures in their lands.

In the weeks leading up to the firing, Tillerson had attempted to communicate more support for the institution he ran, praising the value of the Foreign Service. The guillotine finally descending suggested that message was unwelcome. American diplomacy would be downsized, and there would be less dissent as it happened. Pompeo would step into a State Department where that mission was already well under way.

“I worry at the erosion of the bipartisan consensus on the need for US leadership. . . . If that leadership does not come from us, it will come from elsewhere.”

The Iranians were still on a tight leash from Tehran. But they were working-level diplomats, not the national security hard-liners who had shown up for international talks before.

“And I learned in war the price that is paid when diplomacy fails. And I made a decision that if I ever was lucky enough to be in a position to make a difference, I would try to do so.” His voice, hoarse and weary, cracked with emotion. “I know that war is the failure of diplomacy and the failure of leaders to make alternative decisions.”

Before each round of negotiations, Obama ran through his “red lines” with Kerry and Sherman, then reminded them they were empowered to walk away if they saw fit.

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

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.”

“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.”