The Foreign Service Journal, September 2016

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | SEPTEMBER 2016 91 images and words, we realize he was firmly at the oars, guiding us to his ulti- mate conclusions all along. Tracy Whittington is a Foreign Service of- ficer currently working in the Office of the Historian. She has previously served in the Director General’s Policy Coordination Of- fice, the Operations Center, La Paz, Montreal and Kinshasa. She is a member of the FSJ Editorial Board. Mission Impossible? Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post–Cold War Era Michael Mandelbaum, Oxford University Press, 2016, $29.95/hardcover; $16.49/ Kindle, 504 pages. Reviewed By Geneve Mantri Dean Acheson once said that “Britain had lost an empire and not yet found a role.” U.K. Prime Minister Harold McMillan, when asked what the hardest thing about being prime minister was, quipped: “Events.” Michael Mandel- baum’s Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post–Cold War Era rests between these two competing images of international relations: Is the U.S. post– Cold War history a matter of a choice, or of choices thrust upon us? Mandelbaum’s book is a much- needed and well-documented attempt to review and possibly revise the history of the post–Cold War world. The book has an epic sweep, but is still readable at 381 pages of text, seeking to encompass a vast array of recent U.S. history from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the Iran nuclear deal. The core premise addresses a pivotal question: What has the U.S. penchant for nation-building in states far from our shores done for us, or accomplished for them? The author posits that nation- There is an unforced error in Mandelbaum’s analysis: he implies that the United States has an endless array of options, choices and tools at its disposal. building as a tool of foreign policy emerg- ing from the end of the Cold War has been an unmitigated failure. The pursuit has yielded little, and cost the United States dearly. There is much to commend here. Mandelbaum is a serious scholar, and his work deserves serious discussion and examination. One of his former collaborators, Thomas L. Friedman, the éminence grise of globalization, ranks it as one of the most important books for foreign policy intellectuals and policy- makers to read. That said, much of this work, espe- cially the research on Iraq and Afghani- stan, has been done elsewhere in more detail. But if one were looking for a single volume to take in all the post–Cold War lessons from the fall of the wall to the Obama doctrine, they could do worse than pick up this one. At its best, it sum- marizes very complex issues succinctly. But there are a few nagging concerns. For starters, the sweep is far too broad to reassure the reader that one set of conclusions can apply. Did the author really have to include the Iran nuclear deal, the Middle East peace process and NATO expansion in this one volume? Much of this material is tangential to the core argument of the book and disturbs its coherence. In nation-building interventions, are we trying to turn these countries into Denmark, or are we merely trying to stop them from becoming another Somalia? What does the Iran deal really have to do with a search for successful nation-build- ing? The author would have been better off with a tighter focus. There is also an unforced error in Mandelbaum’s analysis: he implies that the United States has an endless array of options, choices and tools at its disposal. In discussing the Middle East, for example, he implies that the whole multiyear peace process enterprise is a Washington, D.C., policy fixation. He presents the drivers of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its linkage to stability in the region as a matter of fundamental U.S. interest, but then talks about U.S. engagement as an elective. And there is a recurring theme that U.S. policy failures result from a lack of understanding within the foreign policy establishment, presumably including the Foreign Service. While there may be faults with the U.S. diplomatic corps, a lack of analytical, cultural and linguistic abilities is not among them. Some prob- lems suffer from a lack of options, policy relevance, tools, resources or political attention. But usually a Foreign Service officer is advocating for all of these. The heart of the book offers a critique of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Mandelbaum offers key counter-argu- ments to two of the most controversial decisions of the war: disbanding the Iraqi Army and undertaking de-Baathification, thus precipitating the insurgency. He argues—albeit unconvincingly—that the