The Foreign Service Journal, December 2007

How Not to Do Diplomacy Statecraft and How to Restore America’s Standing in the World Dennis Ross, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007, $26.00, hardcover, 370 pages. R EVIEWED BY J AMES P ATTERSON In his preface, Dennis Ross defines statecraft as “the use of assets or the resources and tools (economic, military, intelligence, media) that a state has to pursue its interests and to affect the behavior of others, whether friendly or hostile.” His new book assesses how well the current admin- istration and its two predecessors have practiced that challenging discipline. As the leadMiddle East envoy dur- ing the administrations of former Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton — an experience he de- tailed in his previous book, The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace (2004) — Ross is uniquely qualified to make such comparisons. In the first Bush administration Ross worked for Secretary of State James Baker, who skillfully assembled a global alliance to counter Iraq’s inva- sion of Kuwait. Baker traveled the world for meetings with high-ranking government officials while Pres. Bush diligently worked the phones to as- sure them that the war would be lim- ited to liberating Kuwait, not over- throwing Saddam Hussein. Bush and Baker also used state- craft to help Germany reunify while remaining within NATO, despite ob- jections from some European Union leaders. But their decision not to intervene in the disintegration of Yugoslavia, on the faulty assumption that the Europeans would resolve the problem, led to a bloodbath. As a result, Pres. Clinton spent most of his two terms working to end the hostili- ties and bring Slobodan Milosevic to justice. These were cases of statecraft done well, according to Ross. He also gives Clinton high marks for his approach to the Middle East and his efforts to keep the Israelis and the Palestinians productively engaged in peace negotiations. By contrast, George W. Bush largely neglected the two parties, at least in his first term. Immediately after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Bush wanted to hit back at al-Qaida and “hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at [the] same time,” as George Packer reported in his 2005 book, The Assas- sins’ Gate . That campaign began right away, yet only as an afterthought did Bush send Secretary of State Colin Powell to the United Nations in February 2003 to justify the use of force. Ross deplores Powell’s role in that fiasco, though he concedes that by that point the Cheney/Rumsfeld push for re- gime change in Baghdad was un- stoppable. Similarly, he praises Con- doleezza Rice as intelligent, thought- ful, capable and serious, but says she has been “hamstrung by the ideology of the administration.” “The Iraq case stands as a model for how not to do statecraft,” Ross writes, though intelligence failures un- doubtedly played a part in that disas- trous decision. He speculates that because Bush truly believed that Saddam had helped plan the 9/11 attacks and possessed weapons of mass destruction, he assumed that other nations would support action to oust the regime. Had Bush stuck to the mission of liberating Afghanistan and neutralizing al-Qaida, he might well have succeeded in assembling a true “coalition of the willing,” as his father had done before him. Ross faults the current administra- tion for other foreign policy failures, as well. Bush’s first-term decision to completely withdraw from the Israeli- Palestinian peace process not only stymied progress in talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, but emboldened Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other terrorist groups. And his strong rhetoric against Iran has not played well in the Arab street, which sees the U.S. as an occupier in Iraq, with similar inten- tions for other Persian Gulf nations. “One reason for writing a book on statecraft now,” Ross explains, “is to recognize that administrations, espe- cially those in power for eight years, leave legacies.” Asserting that Pres. Bush abandoned statecraft, he declares: “We can redeem our foreign policy and our place in the world. But if we are to do so, statecraft must no longer be a lost art. It is time to redis- cover it.” Jim Patterson, a former Foreign Service officer, is an economist and freelance journalist whose work has B OOKS 64 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 7