The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2017

70 JULY-AUGUST 2017 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL For these and many more prominent person- alities that appear in the narrative, Dobbins pro- vides quick, incisive por- traits. Sonnenfeldt was “a more pragmatic and steady version of his chief.” General Vernon Walters, ambassador to Germany during reunification, “had remarkably sharp insights but no capacity to explain how he had arrived at them.” President Bill Clinton treated his staff “as if we were potential donors and he was running for a third term,” but Vice President Al Gore “treated subordinates curtly and even discourteously. ... He was also the worst public speaker I ever encountered.” These sketches are among the book’s great pleasures. European affairs occupied Dobbins from his entry into the Service through the collapse of the Soviet Union and its immediate aftermath. Then, through the odd mix of preparation and serendip- ity that marks so many Foreign Service careers, he took up the diplomacy of nation-building in Somalia, Haiti, the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan. Dobbins rose rapidly in the bureaus of Political-Military and European Affairs, with tours as deputy chief of mission in West Germany and appoint- ment in 1991 as ambassador to the European Union. When communist rule collapsed, he argued (as he notes Sonnenfeldt might have done) for a U.S. assistance pro- gram to link Russia and Eastern Europe to the West in “mutually beneficial dependency.” His paper on the subject provoked no response. The arrival of the Clinton administra- tion left Dobbins briefly at loose ends—a Pentagon job fell through when the sec- Lessons Worth Learning Foreign Service: Five Decades on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy James F. Dobbins, Brookings Institution Press, 2017, $29.99/hardcover, $20.22/ Kindle, 341 pages. Reviewed By Harry Kopp James Dobbins’ stellar career began in Vietnam and ended in Afghanistan. His memoir of service spans a period of ebbing, or squandering, of what had seemed in his phrase an “inexhaustible abundance of American power.” It is the story of a career marked by diplomatic successes and darkened in its latter years by frustration. Dobbins joined the Foreign Service in 1967, after a stint in the Navy. Many of his Foreign Service classmates went into the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support program in Viet- nam (known as CORDS), but Dobbins’ Vietnam experience was already behind him—he had served on a carrier in the Gulf of Tonkin—and he went instead to Paris. “If there is a better place to be young, single and gainfully employed,” he writes, “I’ve not found it.” His career really took off, however, after his marriage to a foreigner forced his return to Washington. He became an assistant to Helmut Sonnenfeldt, coun- selor to the department and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s closest adviser on Eastern Europe. Sonnenfeldt was the first of many mentors and colleagues whom Dobbins credits for much of his success. Their names—Bob Blackwill, Rick Burt, Mike McClarty, Dennis Ross, Strobe Talbott, Ray Seitz, among others—will resonate with readers of Dobbins’ generation (this reviewer is one) but may be unfa- miliar to others. BOOKS retary of Defense was fired—but his bureaucratic skills were rec- ognized. He was placed in charge of interagency groups engaged first in arranging the withdrawal of American forces from Somalia, and then in dealing with a refugee and political crisis in Haiti. Haiti embroiled him in domestic politics. Congressional Republicans were united in opposition to the admin- istration’s policies and constantly on the attack. Representative Dan Burton (R-Ind.) came to believe that Dobbins had lied before his subcommittee in testimony on Haiti, and Senator Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) announced his intention to block Dobbins’ appointment to any position requiring Senate confirmation. The department, a pushover for congres- sional bullies, did not defend him. Dobbins spent several years and a good deal of money rebutting Burton’s charge, eventually winning a grievance and a “sizable financial settlement” from the department. In the Senate, however, he remained unconfirmable. State took him out of consideration for embassies in Argentina and the Philippines, and struck his name from a promotion list that required Senate approval. With an ambassadorship no longer a possibility, he became a candidate for the special assignments that engaged him in the world’s most difficult trouble spots for much of the rest of his career. As he had in Somalia and Haiti, Dob- bins (with the title of “special adviser to the president and secretary”) coordi- nated interagency efforts in Bosnia and Kosovo, and was deeply involved in holding allied efforts together, as well. “Critics,” he writes, “refer dismissively to the Kosovo campaign as ‘war by com- mittee,’ as if more unilateral assertion of American preferences would have