78 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2026 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL might have done for any previous boss, the prospect turns Enrich’s stomach. What Is to Be Done? By day 39, exhausted and seeing neither a shred of progress nor an end to whipsaw shifts in policy, Enrich and a group of health officials prepare three whistleblower memos. They document how health staff were summarily cut, the numerous impediments to implementing the waiver for lifesaving assistance, and the 2.6 million lives that will be lost annually as a result. Not surprisingly, Enrich is then quickly placed on administrative leave. Meanwhile, his senior colleague takes the reins of the global health bureau, reaching out to political leadership to distance herself from his memos and pledge her good faith in future collaboration. The “inside or outside” conundrum is familiar to many inclined toward change-making: nongovernmental organization (NGO) or government? Staffer or lobbyist? Public or private sector? Since 2025, those questions have acquired a different gravity. Those who left government—voluntarily or involuntarily—and those who remained are curious about one another, worried about one another, sometimes envious or wary of one another. Enrich credits his memos with contributing in the week after their transmission to the “un-termination” of approximately 400 USAID projects. The colleagues who remained inside, including his successor in bureau leadership, surely also deserve no small measure of that credit. Into the Wood Chipper is an act of witness, but also a call to action. It opens with Timothy Snyder’s exhortation not to obey in advance and closes with practical advice to would-be whistleblowers. And so, as with many stories about courage, it leaves readers to wrestle with themselves: How much divergence from my values will I abide in the name of service? How true are the stories I tell myself? Am I brave? What will I do now? Chris Saenger was a USAID FSO from 2009 to 2025, with postings in Quito, Baghdad, Washington, D.C., Frankfurt, and Bogota. He created the podcast It Was Never a Job to share stories of life overseas with USAID. Green Dreams, Dirty Realities The Elements of Power: A Story of War, Technology, and the Dirtiest Supply Chain on Earth Nicolas Niarchos, Penguin Press, 2026, $32.00/hardcover, e-book available, 480 pages. Reviewed by Lynette Behnke Journalist Nicolas Niarchos’ The Elements of Power is a useful history of how we arrived at today’s critical minerals conundrum. The book will take you from the bottom rung of the critical minerals supply chain to the C-suites of the world’s largest mining and battery companies, to the halls of power in Washington and Beijing. Offering no easy solutions, Niarchos encourages the reader to consider the hard reality that in economics and geopolitics, fixing one problem often creates another. Without giving too much away, U.S. embassy consular officers make a cameo in the acknowledgments for their kindness and determination during a precarious episode. The Elements of Power tells the intertwining stories of colonialism in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and the invention of electric vehicle (EV) batteries, culminating in a diagnosis of how China came to dominate both the DRC’s mining industry and the EV market. The book’s early focus on the horrors of mineral mining gives the impression you are about to read an outright condemnation of the EV industry. Read further, however, and you’ll find an evidence-based, nuanced view of the industry, along with some positive examples of how the West might have its cake and eat it too through ethical mining practices and alternative battery chemistry. The author also takes aim—via the voices of a languishing U.S. mining community—at the environmental regulation that killed the domestic mining industry and pushed one of the world’s dirtiest activities to places outside U.S. jurisdiction. Personal Stories in Context Niarchos interweaves the personal stories of the people he met in southern DRC with the country’s political trajectory. This approach will be familiar to U.S. diplomats who have spent years drawing macro-level lessons from onthe-ground experiences with foreign countries and their citizens. The writing truly shines in the book’s narratives of ordinary “artisanal” miners, a term the author demonstrates is Into the Wood Chipper is an act of witness, but also a call to action.
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