The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence

Well articulated, excellently reasons, nuanced, clear, non-partisan. It is the best book I’ve read on Foreign Policy in a very long time. It is as much a book as a very long very well researched article. Hard to put down.

Having seen Ronan Ferrell on some talk shows, and having read articles of his in the New Yorker, I know he's a very bright man. This book is well done, but, for me, it drills down very deeply in every subject. Again, this was just me, and I did read the book cover to cover. Lots of very interesting accounts of things from past history.

Farrow is clearly emerging as one of the leading journalists of his generation and this book will further burnish his reputation. Part memoir, part history lesson, part current events - overall the book is both informative and well-written. Farrow has first hand insight into the some of the dealing with Afghanistan and Pakistan. He leverages his experiences to cogently tell the story of the shift in American foreign policy over the past few decades to a military dominated process. He's critical of actions in all of the 4 most recent administrations. The portion of the book dealing with the Trump administration is a relatively small portion.

I suspect that the 1 star reviews are coming from people who didn't bother to read the book and are "defending" Trump with the store reviews. While the book is critical of Trump, no recent President comes out of this book looking good.

Insightful, well written and provocative, Pulitzer Prize winner Farrow explains why diplomacy is needed. Farrow has interviewed every living Secretary of State for this book and draws on his own experience working for the late, great Richard Holbrooks in Foggy Bottom — a time illustrating how men and women and their foibles shape history — or fail to. “Beneath the sweep of history,” Farrow notes, “was a small human struggle, of ego and age and fear.” Excellent book.

Journalist and former State Department official Ronan Farrow has written a lamentation titled, War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence, about the transformation of diplomacy by the United States. He interviewed lots of people for this book, many on the record, including all living former Secretaries of State. The result in a comprehensive, well-footnoted book that describes through stories the ways in which diplomacy is changing, along with American influence. Readers interested in public policy are those most likely to enjoy this finely written account of a dramatic transformation in world affairs.

Rating: Five-star (I love it)

Inticingly well written. Discusses what is hard to look at. I appreciate the work of Ronan Farrow, (son of Mia Farrow ... and ____ (could be Frank Sinatra?) This year he won a Pulitzer Prize for his writing and work about the Me too movement. And he is very cute and refreshingly articulate.

If the author’s parents had not been celebrities, this book would not have been published. While the issues addressed are real, especially the trump administration’s destruction of the State Department, a more credible assessment awaits.

A very interesting read, with Farrow drawing on his time as a (very young, extremely inexperienced) official at the State Department. His follow-on interviews with warlords and former diplomats provide for great information given the context of his prior work.

However, he makes some mistakes that are inexcusable for someone who is supposedly familiar with the State Department - for example: on page 213, Farrow says " ... Marc Meznar, who represented the Population Refugees and Migration bureau at the American embassy in Brussels, met with an EU official, Mark Boucey ..." Farrow should know the difference between the American Embassy in Brussels and the U.S. Mission to the European Union, which is located in Brussels; the former handles relations with Belgium, the latter with the EU (there's also a third embassy, to NATO, but that's not relevant here). Additionally, it's inaccurate to say that any FSO "represents" a particular bureau ... Farrow should know that, too.

Farrow appears to have transposed this mistake from Opiyo Oloya's book "Black Hawks Rising," which Farrow cites in his notes later, and which said the following: "... Marc Meznar, the US Refugee and Migration Affairs Officer at the US Embassy in Brussels, met with Mark Boucey, an officer at the European Commission... ." This is the kind of error that an author who is basing his credibility in writing about diplomacy largely on his experience at the State Department should have caught easily.

Another mistake is revealed in one of many irksome points at which the reader really struggles to take Farrow seriously. When he refers to "semantic twists" that he apparently finds absurd, Farrow cites an email he sent to a colleague, in which he ridicules a diplomat's word choices by writing "Oh boy, how Rwanda-press-conference-circa-1994 is this!?" Ronan Farrow was SEVEN YEARS OLD at the time of the Rwanda crisis in 1994 (- he was born in 1987), how on earth would he have any frame of reference for what was happening at a press conference at that time? Child phenom or not, he has no place talking about things about which he has zero idea. I can imagine his more experienced colleagues at State who know very well when to keep their mouths shut were put off by this kind of thing, also.

Ronan Farrow’s “War on Peace” reveals the struggle, largely hidden from the public, between seasoned diplomats and the military-industrial complex in determining the direction of U.S. policy — primarily in the war on Afghanistan following the tragic events of September 11, 2001. Farrow concludes that drastic cuts at the State Department have created “a nation that shoots first and asks question later.” The book is a page-turner.

Sadly, Farrow, like other establishment figures, stays within the bounds of establishment discourse. He accepts the official explanation of 9/11 — “The 9/11 Commission Report.” Looking at problems beyond the bounds of establishment discourse is likely to lead the reader to a different conclusion.

Today, more than 3000 military and intelligence personnel, engineers, architects, professors, and high level personnel in other countries, find that the evidence does not support the official explanation of 9/11. Mainstream news media dismisses them as “conspiracy theorists.”

The term “conspiracy theory” was developed by the CIA as a means of undercutting critics of the Warren Commission’s report that President John F. Kennedy was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald. The use of the term “conspiracy theory” was heavily promoted in the media by the CIA.

Farrow fails to disclose key facts leading up to the war on Afghanistan.

The attacks on 9/11 came after negotiations with the Taliban for a pipeline had broken down. The Taliban, after initially negotiating with Unocal, had begun showing a preference for Bridas Corporation of Argentina. During the negotiations — which occurred prior to 9/11, “U.S. representatives told the Taliban (“Bin Laden, The Forbidden Truth”) ‘either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs’.”

Afghanistan’s interim president, Hamid Karzai, and the U.S. special envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad, were formerly employed as consultants to Unocal, the U.S. oil company which spent much of the 1990s seeking to build a pipeline through Afghanistan.

Zalmay Khalilzad drew up Unocal’s risk analysis on its proposed trans-Afghan gas pipeline. In 2003, Zalmay Khalizad became the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, and on June 22, 2005 was sworn in as ambassador to Iraq.

Niaz Naik, a former Pakistani Foreign Secretary, was told by senior American officials in mid-July that military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October (BBC News, September 18, 2001).

On September 23, 2001 BBC News reported that four of the hijack “suspects” were alive. Director Mueller acknowledged “that the identity of several of the suicide hijackers is in doubt.”

On September 17, 2001, the Associated Press published passenger lists for AA Flight 11, UA Flight 175, AA Flight 77, and UA Flight 93, based on information supplied by “family members, friends, co-workers and law enforcement” [sic]. There were no Arab names on these lists.

On March 2, 2007, during an interview televised on Democracy Now!, General Wesley Clark, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander, stated: “About 10 days after 9/11, I went through the Pentagon, . . . and one of the generals called me in. . . . He says, “We’ve made the decision we’re going to war with Iraq.” . . . “So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, “Are we still going to war with Iraq?” And he said, “Oh, it’s worse than that.” . . . “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”

Farrow also fails to disclose:

On September 11, 2001, Mr. Trump, on Fox5NY, said, ”they had bombs”.

The 9/11 Commission Chair Thomas H. Kean and Vice Chair Lee H. Hamilton wrote in their book — “Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission” — that they were "setup to fail".

Sen. Max Cleland (R-GA) resigned from the 9/11 Commission saying "it's a scam".

Philip D. Zelikow, Executive Director of The 9/11 Commission, principal author of “The 9/11 Commission Report,” is an expert in how to misuse public trust and create public myths. In 1998, Zelikow wrote “Catastrophic Terrorism” about imagining "the transformative event" three years before 9/11.

In September 2000, The Project for the New American Century wrote (p51), "Preserving the desirable strategic situation in which the United States now finds itself requires a globally preeminent military capability . . . the process of transformation . . . is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor.”

Was 9/11 the "new Pearl Harbor"?

In research conducted across 165 countries by The Economist Intelligence Unit (“The Best And Worst Countries For Democracy,” Forbes, February 2018), Norway was ranked the world's best democracy, recording the highest score 9.87. In last year's study, the United States was downgraded from a "full democracy" to a "flawed democracy" and in the 2017 edition, it only came 21st overall with a score of 7.98. A handful of corporations control most of what we watch, hear, and read. Unjust and unjustified wars of aggression, have cost the American taxpayer dearly. This has more to do with the decline of American influence around the world than cutbacks at the State Department.

Torn between five stars and one star, I give five stars for what Farrow has written; one star for what he has omitted.

Do not waste your time reading this frenetic account of the failure of U.S. foreign policy. Many of us will agree that since the unpredicted 1979 collapse of the CIA-rigged government of Iran and the complete surprise of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, our military-industrial complex has been wading through recent history of smoke and haze of frenetic spending for the sake of "defense", while stripping our foreign policy of proven inaccuracies and replacing that with nothing! Farrow decries this failure with little to suggest on how to repair it.

An absolute mystery as to why this over-confident, inexperienced, shallow and snippety book is so lauded. Must be the young charm, and name recognition. In the twitter age reputations are indeed made out of nothing. No depth whatsoever.

The book, of course, goes into great detail on its subject matter - the end of diplomacy / decline of influence in the U.S. However, it may be better suited for folks who are already well versed with the intricacies of the country's current events & political history, in my opinion. I found the book to be tedious reading for me.

Beautifully told. Factual, comedic, and touching while answering many of the "why things are the way they are" sort of questions about foreign policy. Also a lovely peek into the life and relationships of the author! LOVED this!

If the author’s parents had not been celebrities, this book would not have been published. While the issues addressed are real, especially the trump administration’s destruction of the State Department, a more credible assessment awaits.

A very interesting read, with Farrow drawing on his time as a (very young, extremely inexperienced) official at the State Department. His follow-on interviews with warlords and former diplomats provide for great information given the context of his prior work.

However, he makes some mistakes that are inexcusable for someone who is supposedly familiar with the State Department - for example: on page 213, Farrow says " ... Marc Meznar, who represented the Population Refugees and Migration bureau at the American embassy in Brussels, met with an EU official, Mark Boucey ..." Farrow should know the difference between the American Embassy in Brussels and the U.S. Mission to the European Union, which is located in Brussels; the former handles relations with Belgium, the latter with the EU (there's also a third embassy, to NATO, but that's not relevant here). Additionally, it's inaccurate to say that any FSO "represents" a particular bureau ... Farrow should know that, too.

Farrow appears to have transposed this mistake from Opiyo Oloya's book "Black Hawks Rising," which Farrow cites in his notes later, and which said the following: "... Marc Meznar, the US Refugee and Migration Affairs Officer at the US Embassy in Brussels, met with Mark Boucey, an officer at the European Commission... ." This is the kind of error that an author who is basing his credibility in writing about diplomacy largely on his experience at the State Department should have caught easily.

Another mistake is revealed in one of many irksome points at which the reader really struggles to take Farrow seriously. When he refers to "semantic twists" that he apparently finds absurd, Farrow cites an email he sent to a colleague, in which he ridicules a diplomat's word choices by writing "Oh boy, how Rwanda-press-conference-circa-1994 is this!?" Ronan Farrow was SEVEN YEARS OLD at the time of the Rwanda crisis in 1994 (- he was born in 1987), how on earth would he have any frame of reference for what was happening at a press conference at that time? Child phenom or not, he has no place talking about things about which he has zero idea. I can imagine his more experienced colleagues at State who know very well when to keep their mouths shut were put off by this kind of thing, also.

Ronan Farrow’s “War on Peace” reveals the struggle, largely hidden from the public, between seasoned diplomats and the military-industrial complex in determining the direction of U.S. policy — primarily in the war on Afghanistan following the tragic events of September 11, 2001. Farrow concludes that drastic cuts at the State Department have created “a nation that shoots first and asks question later.” The book is a page-turner.

Sadly, Farrow, like other establishment figures, stays within the bounds of establishment discourse. He accepts the official explanation of 9/11 — “The 9/11 Commission Report.” Looking at problems beyond the bounds of establishment discourse is likely to lead the reader to a different conclusion.

Today, more than 3000 military and intelligence personnel, engineers, architects, professors, and high level personnel in other countries, find that the evidence does not support the official explanation of 9/11. Mainstream news media dismisses them as “conspiracy theorists.”

The term “conspiracy theory” was developed by the CIA as a means of undercutting critics of the Warren Commission’s report that President John F. Kennedy was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald. The use of the term “conspiracy theory” was heavily promoted in the media by the CIA.

Farrow fails to disclose key facts leading up to the war on Afghanistan.

The attacks on 9/11 came after negotiations with the Taliban for a pipeline had broken down. The Taliban, after initially negotiating with Unocal, had begun showing a preference for Bridas Corporation of Argentina. During the negotiations — which occurred prior to 9/11, “U.S. representatives told the Taliban (“Bin Laden, The Forbidden Truth”) ‘either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs’.”

Afghanistan’s interim president, Hamid Karzai, and the U.S. special envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad, were formerly employed as consultants to Unocal, the U.S. oil company which spent much of the 1990s seeking to build a pipeline through Afghanistan.

Zalmay Khalilzad drew up Unocal’s risk analysis on its proposed trans-Afghan gas pipeline. In 2003, Zalmay Khalizad became the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, and on June 22, 2005 was sworn in as ambassador to Iraq.

Niaz Naik, a former Pakistani Foreign Secretary, was told by senior American officials in mid-July that military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October (BBC News, September 18, 2001).

On September 23, 2001 BBC News reported that four of the hijack “suspects” were alive. Director Mueller acknowledged “that the identity of several of the suicide hijackers is in doubt.”

On September 17, 2001, the Associated Press published passenger lists for AA Flight 11, UA Flight 175, AA Flight 77, and UA Flight 93, based on information supplied by “family members, friends, co-workers and law enforcement” [sic]. There were no Arab names on these lists.

On March 2, 2007, during an interview televised on Democracy Now!, General Wesley Clark, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander, stated: “About 10 days after 9/11, I went through the Pentagon, . . . and one of the generals called me in. . . . He says, “We’ve made the decision we’re going to war with Iraq.” . . . “So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, “Are we still going to war with Iraq?” And he said, “Oh, it’s worse than that.” . . . “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”

Farrow also fails to disclose:

On September 11, 2001, Mr. Trump, on Fox5NY, said, ”they had bombs”.

The 9/11 Commission Chair Thomas H. Kean and Vice Chair Lee H. Hamilton wrote in their book — “Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission” — that they were "setup to fail".

Sen. Max Cleland (R-GA) resigned from the 9/11 Commission saying "it's a scam".

Philip D. Zelikow, Executive Director of The 9/11 Commission, principal author of “The 9/11 Commission Report,” is an expert in how to misuse public trust and create public myths. In 1998, Zelikow wrote “Catastrophic Terrorism” about imagining "the transformative event" three years before 9/11.

In September 2000, The Project for the New American Century wrote (p51), "Preserving the desirable strategic situation in which the United States now finds itself requires a globally preeminent military capability . . . the process of transformation . . . is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor.”

Was 9/11 the "new Pearl Harbor"?

In research conducted across 165 countries by The Economist Intelligence Unit (“The Best And Worst Countries For Democracy,” Forbes, February 2018), Norway was ranked the world's best democracy, recording the highest score 9.87. In last year's study, the United States was downgraded from a "full democracy" to a "flawed democracy" and in the 2017 edition, it only came 21st overall with a score of 7.98. A handful of corporations control most of what we watch, hear, and read. Unjust and unjustified wars of aggression, have cost the American taxpayer dearly. This has more to do with the decline of American influence around the world than cutbacks at the State Department.

Torn between five stars and one star, I give five stars for what Farrow has written; one star for what he has omitted.

Do not waste your time reading this frenetic account of the failure of U.S. foreign policy. Many of us will agree that since the unpredicted 1979 collapse of the CIA-rigged government of Iran and the complete surprise of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, our military-industrial complex has been wading through recent history of smoke and haze of frenetic spending for the sake of "defense", while stripping our foreign policy of proven inaccuracies and replacing that with nothing! Farrow decries this failure with little to suggest on how to repair it.

An absolute mystery as to why this over-confident, inexperienced, shallow and snippety book is so lauded. Must be the young charm, and name recognition. In the twitter age reputations are indeed made out of nothing. No depth whatsoever.