The Foreign Service Journal, November 2014

38 NOVEMBER 2014 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL sor of conflict management and senior fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and a scholar at the Middle East Institute. In 2012, with David R. Smock, he co-authored Facilitating Dia- logue: USIP’s Work in Conflict Zones . The Demilitarization of American Diplomacy: Two Cheers for Striped Pants Laurence Pope, Palgrave Pivot, 2014, $45/hardcover, $23.87/Kindle, 90 pages. In this hard-hitting monograph, retired Ambassador Laurence Pope documents the growing dysfunction of American diplomacy. As Pope documents, the State Department has already ceded most foreign policy functions to the White House staff, and allowed political appointees to mar- ginalize career Foreign Service members. Writing both as an insider and a historian, Pope observes that even as the Pentagon and the military services are bus- ily reinventing themselves for the post-9/11 era, State merely promises to do a better job of nation-building next time. Yet in the information age, diplomacy is actually more important than ever. And in its absence, America may be drawn into more wars it cannot afford to fight. While not particularly sanguine about prospects for revers- ing these trends, Pope insists that “the time has come to restore the institutions of American diplomacy for a world of sovereign states.” To see Pope’s April 29 AFSA Book Notes discussion, please got to http://bit.ly/PopeBookEvent. Laurence Pope, a Foreign Service officer from 1969 to 2000, served as ambassador to Chad from 1993 to 1996, among many other assignments. He was also nominated as chief of mission in Kuwait in 2000, but the Senate never acted on his nomination. Ambassador Pope was briefly recalled from retirement to serve as chargé d’affaires in Libya from 2012 to 2013. He is the author of François de Callières: A Political Life (2010), a biography of the author of On Negotiating with Sovereigns , an iconic work that has remained in print for nearly three centuries. American Ambassadors: The Past, Present and Future of America’s Diplomats Dennis Jett, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, $40, hardcover, 270 pages. The behavior of several political appointees for ambassadorial positions in confirmation hearings earlier this year scandalized Washington and drew unusual attention to the role of ambassadors in U.S. foreign affairs. “Everyone is familiar with the title ‘ambassador,’ and many people think they know what the job entails,” Dennis Jett writes in the introduction to his timely work, American Ambassadors. “Most of those impressions are wrong, however. Few people have any idea who gets the title or what that person really does. And in today’s world of instant communications, the question is often raised as to whether they are necessary at all.” To address these issues, Jett, a retired FSO and two-time ambassador, has written a book that explains where ambassa- dors come from, where they go, what their work entails and why they still matter. He describes the different paths to the title that are taken by career diplomats and political appointees, how an ambassador’s effectiveness is measured and why at least four ambassadors in recent years have resigned because of poor performance. He makes the case for why, in today’s ever more globalized world, their work is more important than ever. Dennis Jett is a professor at Pennsylvania State University’s School of International Affairs. During a 28-year Foreign Service career, he served on three continents and in Washington, D.C. He was appointed U.S. ambassador to Mozambique in 1993 and ambassador to Peru in 1996. A frequent contributor to the Jour- nal , he is the author of Why American Foreign Policy Fails: Unsafe at Home and Despised Abroad (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Managing Overseas Operations: Kiss Your Latte Goodbye Gregory W. Engle and Tibor P. Nagy Jr., Vargas Publishing, 2012, $18.99, paperback, 236 pages. Named the Paris Book Festival’s 2014 winner for nonfiction, Managing Overseas Operations: Kiss Your Latte Goodbye is a compilation of rock-hard practical advice delivered in a highly digestiblemanner. As retired FSOBob Houdek stated in his Journal review (February 2013), the book “should be on the reading list of every U.S. firm sendingmanagers overseas.” The authors, both veteran FSOs and ambassadors, draw on a combined six decades of international experience to address the challenges of managing international organizations, diplomatic missions and nongovernmental organizations. There are no footnotes. Neither are there extensive empirical data or theoreti-