THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2024 79 and USAID and competition between Washington and the mission in La Paz over priorities, the book gives texture to the discussion of how programs are chosen and implemented. Foreign assistance is a fine art. Good aid programming, orchestrated in the field through USAID’s missions, requires interpreting Washington’s politics and policies, understanding the limits imposed by the host country context, and designing, in concert with a host of partners—local officials and organizations, grantees, contractors, and the citizens themselves—approaches to complicated problems in areas like health, education, governance, and livelihood. The book doesn’t shy away from development failures—the inability of USAID’s programs to develop a meaningful alternative to coca, most prominently. But it notes a number of successes: in health delivery to underserved populations, improved crop production (corn, beef, sugar), creation of civil society organizations, improved local government, and aspects of election administration. For readers new to foreign assistance and its implementation, the book is an excellent introduction. Those more experienced—practitioners and former Foreign Service officers—will take comfort in the book’s reminders of past battles fought, hopes of what might have been, successes won, and disappointments suffered. Heilman concludes that development work in Bolivia is directly related to our own work at home. “There is great commonality in the problems that U.S. citizens are facing with those … identified in the developing world,” he states. Our concerns about protecting rights to health, education, and employment are part of a U.S. agenda that is “the essence of our struggle to promote change in the developing world.” Lessons from Bolivia have implications for how we pursue this agenda at home as well as abroad. Following 33 years in USAID—Kenya, East Pakistan (Bangladesh), Indonesia, Senegal, Diplomacy in a Changing World And Then What?: Inside Stories of 21st Century Diplomacy Catherine Ashton, Elliott & Thompson, 2023, $10.99/paperback, e-book available, 256 pages. Reviewed by Eric Rubin It has been only a few months since the publication of Baroness Catherine Ashton’s memoir of her time as the first European Union (E.U.) High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security, from 2009 to 2014. The position was created by the Lisbon Treaty to oversee coordination of foreign policy among E.U. member states and the establishment of a permanent E.U. “foreign ministry” in Brussels. Though this well-written, candid, and at times amusing memoir went on sale only recently, much of it reads like ancient history in the world of late 2023. It is hard not to feel nostalgia for a simpler world that is very much in the past. Ashton writes of the desire of many E.U. leaders to have a British official be the first occupant of the High Representative post. The reasons ranged from a desire to avoid Franco-German competition for the job to the fact that British diplomacy was seen as the best among all E.U. member states, given 1,000 years of history and practice and the U.K.’s declining but still valuable “special relationship” with the United States as well. Yet only two years after Ashton stepped down, U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron called a referendum on British membership in the E.U., and the idea of Britain playing a leading role in E.U. diplomacy came to a crashing stop. Ashton was neither a career diplomat nor a career civil servant when she was offered the job. She had been a Labour Party activist, an advocate of nuclear disarmament, and a local councilor. Chosen as a life member of the House of Lords in 1999 by Prime Minister Tony Blair, she went on to lead the House of Lords and to play an important role in supporting the Blair government’s efforts, including the very painful experience of the U.K.’s decision to support the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. As a non-career appointee, Ashton writes convincingly and amusingly of India, Russia, Burma, and Washington, D.C.—Desaix “Terry” Myers taught at the National Defense University until he retired in 2016. He is the author of several books and a chapter on USAID, “More Operator Than Policymaker,” in The National Security Enterprise (Rishikoff and George, Georgetown Press, 2017). Retired, he spends his time tilting at various windmills.
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