The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2019

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JULY-AUGUST 2019 71 In Our Man we read about Hol- brooke’s misfiring of a .45 in Vietnam (never again did he pack heat), the letter from LTC (ret.) Banky challenging Holbrooke’s account of Mount Igman in To End a War (Modern Library, 1999), his recollection of General Jones’ attempt to fire him and Vice President Joe Biden’s dismissive view of the consequences of a precipitous withdrawal from Afghanistan. But for current, former and retired members of the Foreign Service, perhaps the question that is foremost (we all have our Holbrooke stories) is this: Was Holbrooke effective? In 1996, when recommending Holbrooke for Secretary of State, then–Deputy Secretary Strobe Talbott described him to President Bill Clinton as “high value, high mainte- nance”—but could you have had a Hol- brooke with the same drive, vision and sense of history without all of the drama? Packer answers yes to the first, and no to the second. Without the drama there was no Holbrooke, and without Hol- brooke there would have been no action. As he wrote in a private letter to the woman who would become his first wife: “Remember, what is true in foreign policy is also in this case true in love: Inaction, inactivity is as much an action as action itself; it is as much of a decision to do nothing as it is to do something.” And as he said to Strobe Talbott when lobbying for the Secretary of State position: “Sum of the actions, the good and the bad, produced whatever I am today.” Can or should the U.S. Foreign Service produce another Holbrooke? His Peace Corps rater fromMorocco said: “I wish I had a half dozen Holbrookes working for me.” But, paraphrasing Packer here, his career development officer in Vietnam told Holbrooke: “Forget FSO-1, or Assis- tant Secretary, you stand no chance of rapid promotion, or much promotion at all, unless your behavior improves.” And Henry Kissinger described him this way: “Holbrooke was too much a swaggering American to understand why Russia might imagine it was being encircled.” Perhaps like too many in the Foreign Service, Holbrooke’s dissent started out loud and grew softer, so that by the time he was the decision-maker—on Afghanistan—Packer writes, recalling a pivotal conversation between Holbrooke and Biden documented in Holbrooke’s papers, it had disappeared altogether. Packer told me that he wrote the non- fiction book to read more like a novel and less like a biography, to “turn diplomacy into an adventure.” In 2014 he had begun reading the Holbrooke papers, which he had secured access to from Kati Marton soon after Holbrooke’s death. In 2016 he began writing, he said, and the idea of paralleling Holbrooke’s life with the end of the American century came to him on Hillary Clinton’s unsuc- cessful election night in 2016. This is my last Holbrooke piece, Packer told me. (He wrote the infamous 2009 New Yorker profile.) But Holbrooke, citing history, would be the first to remind him: Is anything ever final? If to have read the book is to have met the man, then George Packer has done us an infinite service. With Our Man: Rich- ard Holbrooke and the End of the Ameri- can Century, he has made a contribution to our understanding of the conduct of diplomacy and the fact that foreign policy is not always determined exclusively by national interests. Big personalities mat- ter, too—and Holbrooke did. Matthew Asada is a Foreign Service of- ficer currently serving as project manager for Expo 2020 Dubai in the Office of the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. He served from 2010 to 2011 as special assistant to Ambas- sador Holbrooke and then Ambassador Grossman, the special representatives for Afghanistan and Pakistan. The views expressed in this article are the reviewer’s own and not necessarily those of the De- partment of State or the U.S. government. The Stunning Rise of Chinese Sea Power Red Star Over the Pacific, Second Edition: China’s Rise and the Challenge to U.S. Maritime Strategy Toshi Yoshihara and James R. Holmes, Naval Institute Press, 2018, $36.95/hardcover, 376 pages. Reviewed by Dmitry Filipoff China is aggressively rising toward superpower status while emerging as the primary peer competitor of the United States. In the second edition of Red Star Over the Pacific , authors Toshi Yoshihara and James Holmes examine how the world’s oceans assisted in China’s mete- oric rise while also becoming the scene of regional rivalry. They present the devel- opment of Chinese sea power within the larger context of Chinese grand strategy. The authors begin their book with the chapter “Mahan’s Lingering Ghost.” Alfred Thayer Mahan, the maritime strategist who served as president of the But could you have had a Holbrooke with the same drive, vision and sense of history without all of the drama?