The Foreign Service Journal, October 2018

68 OCTOBER 2018 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL He won a Pulitzer Prize for his exposé of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein in The New Yorker , where he is a contributing writer. He has written only one book—this one—but cut him some slack: he is just 30 years old. War on Peace is long-form, first-person journalism, draw- ing on experience and interviews. It’s a book with a point of view. There is noth- ing subtle about it. When Farrow grinds his axe, the blade and whetstone are on full display. He states his thesis in a prologue: “What follows,” he writes, “is an account of a crisis. It tells the story of a life-saving discipline torn apart by political cowardice.” The “anticommunist zeal that propelled American involvement from Vietnam to Afghanistan,” Ronan con- tinues, planted the “seeds of the trends that would explode under President Trump—the devaluing and deprioriti- zation of diplomacy, the rise of gener- als in policymaking. … Hundreds of thousands of innocents would become casualties of those [American military] interventions.” Farrow builds his case around per- sonalities he worked with or interviewed, and on American policy in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Colombia, Egypt and Syria. A final section on the Trump administration is presented as a cul- mination of long-established trends, although—perhaps because Farrow cannot conceal his loathing—it reads as In Defense of a Life-Saving Discipline War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence Ronan Farrow, W. W. Norton & Co., New York, 2018, $27.95/hardcover, $14.99/Kindle, 392 pages. Reviewed By Harry W. Kopp There is a school of literary criticism, much in vogue during this reviewer’s student years, that says the text on the page, and only the text, is worthy of close study. The intentions, background, even the name of the author do not matter—meaning and value are to be sought in the words alone. But it is impossible to write about War on Peace without reference to the author’s remarkable biography. Ronan Farrow grew up with 13 siblings, most of them international adoptions with physical and mental disabilities. His mother, and theirs, is the actress Mia Farrow. His father (and brother-in-law) is filmmaker Woody Allen—unless, as his mother has hinted, it was Frank Sinatra. Farrow entered college at 11 and graduated at 15. He spent two years with UNICEF in Nigeria, Eritrea, Angola and Sudan, where an untreated infec- tion left him in a wheelchair for several years. He earned a law degree at Yale, practiced with the white-shoe firm Davis, Polk & Wardwell, and studied international relations at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. He was a staff member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and a special adviser at the State Department, first to Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke (2009- 2010) and then to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. BOOKS something of an afterthought. The story of Richard Hol- brooke’s time as Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan during 2009 and 2010 is the heart of the book. Farrow first met Holbrooke in New York in 2004, when Far- row was 16 and Holbrooke was 58. In 2009 he lobbied his way into a job with Holbrooke (much as Holbrooke, a diplomatic star in Presi- dent Bill Clinton’s administration, had lobbied his way into Hillary Clinton’s State Department). Farrow calls Holbrooke “a creature of another era,” one whose experience as a junior Foreign Service officer in Viet- nam bred a contempt for “mil-think” that colored his thinking about the war in Afghanistan and how to end it. Holbrooke’s military counterpart in Afghanistan and Pakistan was General David Petraeus, commander of the Cen- tral Command and later commander of U.S. and international forces in Afghani- stan. According to Farrow, Petraeus called Holbrooke “my wingman,” a term Holbrooke found insulting. “His job should be to drop bombs when I tell him to,” said Holbrooke (who during the 1995 Bosnian crisis had directed NATO strikes on Serbian targets). Throughout his career, Farrow says, Holbrooke, “an impossible blowhard,” impressed and antagonized people he needed to work with. He won no friends, but in Farrow’s view “he was the rare asshole who was worth it.” Farrow seems to assign more blame for the failures of U.S. foreign policy to the U.S. military than to their civilian political leadership.