The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2021

78 JULY-AUGUST 2021 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL this book comes in at an economical 244 pages). As someone who has participated in multilateral arms control negotiations that have dragged on for wearying years, I could not agree more with her conclu- sion that these issues can rarely be solved by “drive-by” diplomacy; they will require time, resources, high-level attention, and public and political buy-in. In that regard, the author provides brilliant examples of building constituen- cies among religious communities, the press, Congress and so on. Foreign policy begins at home, and every diplomat can benefit from this firsthand look at how to build domestic support for diplomacy. Though some readers may think the topic is dry, this book is, in fact, extremely readable with flashes of humor. Take a laugh-out-loud sidebar on the Obama- Medvedev “summit” in a basement store in Copenhagen, where the two hashed out nuclear arms control with dozens of naked mannequins hastily stashed behind curtains. And watch for a U.S. negotiator’s hilarious rebuttal to Russian claims about converted missile trans- porters that involved fishing cows out of missile silos. Since Gottemoeller has compiled a list of historic firsts as a stateswoman, women (and men also) will find her occasional musings on the role of gender in diplomacy of interest. She recalls how she sought to combine (temporary) single-parenting in Geneva with her first arms control stint in 1990, concluding it was an overreach into “superwoman- hood.” As someone who witnessed Soviet and Russian misogyny for years in Mos- cow, I particularly appreciated how she highlighted the substantial role of women on the U.S. side to encourage her Russian counterparts to acknowledge the talented but few and marginalized women in their own ranks. Here too, adding to a career filled with international security achieve- ments, Rose Gottemoeller has made a difference. Gottemoeller’s book is a major contribution to arms control history and to diplomacy, and it is likely to feature in international relations syllabi in the United States—and, I would hope, in Russia and many other countries. During a 37-year Foreign Service career, Ambassador (ret.) Laura Kennedy served in multiple assignments dealing with Russia, arms control and nonproliferation. At the outset of her career, she served—as did Rose Gottemoeller—as a guide on U.S. official exchange exhibits in the Soviet Union. The Parable of a Beekeeper The Ardent Swarm: A Novel Yamen Manai (translated by Lara Vergnaud), Amazon Crossing, 2021, $14.95/paper- back, e-book available, 204 pages. Reviewed by Gordon Gray At the end of my tour as ambas- sador to Tunisia in July 2012, there was significant progress to report and many opportunities to present in my farewell cable. For one, after wide- spread popular protests, later recognized as the start of the Arab Spring, had forced President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali into exile in January 2011, Tunisia held its first free and fair elections in October of that year. Yet my farewell cable also flagged a growing security concern: The rise of violent Salafism (a puritanical branch of Sunni Islam) and the new government’s apparent inability or unwillingness to address it posed a rising threat to Tunisia and the United States. There were several warning signs. Salafists targeted the dean of faculty at the University of Manouba (outside the capital), closing the university for nearly two months in the spring of 2012. That June, a Salafist mob defaced art works at an exhibition in La Marsa, an affluen t suburb of Tunis. Novelist Yamen Manai refers to both events in The Ardent Swarm , an elegant parable of post-revolution Tunisia told from the perspective of a simple bee- keeper named Sidi. (Manai wrote the book in French in 2017, and it was trans- lated into English in 2021.) Manai prefaces The Ardent Swarm with a Quranic verse about bees. Interest- ingly, as a Turkish journalist has written, bees are “admired in Islamic culture as a symbol of some- one following a mission for the benefit of humanity.” The book’s title comes from the technique that honey-producing bees deploy to defend their hive against attacking hornets. Indeed, as The New York Times explained in an article last year, “bees have demonstrated a remarkable survival strategy by working as a team to fight back against individual invaders.” Coincidentally or not, an article in The Atlantic in 2013, “How Tunisia Is Turning into a Salafist Battleground,” told of secu- lar students at the University of Manouba who had been inspired to “ swarm the parapet and run the Tunisian flag back up the pole” (emphasis added). The protagonist of The Ardent Swarm lives in the remote village of Nawa,