The Foreign Service Journal, September 2016

92 SEPTEMBER 2016 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Iraqi Army had already disintegrated, and bringing it back would have alienated the people Saddam had oppressed, as would reinstating his party members. There is a case to be made, as Mandel- baum does, that the United States could have avoided Somalia, as it did Rwanda, on the grounds that these are far-away countries of which we really know very little on a continent the United States has largely ignored for much of modern history. But there also seems to be some inconsistency in his published views on this point. His earlier book, That Used To Be Us (Picador, 2012), written with Thomas L. Friedman, made the case that the United States ignores the impact of the globalized world at its peril. Yet Man- delbaum seems to have disregarded that advice in this recent work. The United States tried very hard to ignore Bosnia and Kosovo, until the problems threatened NATO and Euro- pean Union stability. The United States did ignore the 1994 Rwanda genocide, and has been apologizing ever since. And there is an argument to be made that the United States ignored Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion and paved the way for the Taliban, if not 9/11 and our current terrorism concerns. The fact is that there are some problems Washington can’t ignore, even if it would like to. Mission Failure makes an important contribution, but the core question is not simply: How do we do nation-building and get it right? Rather, it is this: In an interconnected world, can we afford to sit the game out, despite the crudeness of our tools, and what are the long-term costs and consequences of doing so? n Geneve Mantri served as the nonprolifera- tion manager at U.S. Embassy Chisinau from 2013 to 2015, where he dealt with trafficking, nonproliferation and WMD issues. Prior to that, he directed Amnesty International’s counterterrorism program, and served on former Senator Richard Lugar’s staff as a national security fellow. He has served as a consultant to the United Nations Children’s Fund, the United Nations Development Program and the Carnegie Corporation. In August, he joined AFSA’s Professional Policy Issues team. He is mar- ried to a Foreign Service officer.