Ronan Farrow, the son of Mia and Woody Allen, is the Pulitzer-prize winning journalist whose exposé triggered #MeToo. Now, he has written an acclaimed book on waning US diplomatic influence – and he’s still only 30.
The interview itself is quite fascinating, especially if you remember movie director Woody Allen and/or actress Mia Farrow. But Ronan Farrow alone is a brilliant and fascinating man.
The new book is War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence by Ronan Farrow (April 2018).
I have not read the book and so am not recommending it personally. You might want to read the reviews at Amazon.
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This is one review that I found very interesting. Note that the author of this review is criticizing the book, not just repeating what is in it. I have emphasized one paragraph in particular. A reply to this comment suggested that we need both diplomacy and warmongering, not just diplomacy alone. Me I would like to try stopping the warmongering and leave diplomacy and a more isolationist type of self-defense even though I know that won't happen.
Four star review of book: The Decline and Fall of the State DepartmentMy question in my message just previous received a ninth response since I sent you the link, one that I think is quite good, from Hans Mulders. To see it, scroll down. If some of your realistic forecasts for the future are gloomy, do you think sharing those realistic gloomy forecasts with your children is a good thing to do for the sake of providing them with your best adult guidance?
By David Swanson on April 24, 2018
Format: Hardcover
Ronan Farrow's book War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence recounts episodes from the Obama-Trump militarization of U.S. foreign policy. While the book begins with and has been marketed with the story of Trump firing lots of key diplomats and leaving positions unfilled, much of its content is from the pre-Trump, Obama-era and even Bush-era erosion of diplomacy as something distinct from war and weapons sales.
The distinction between employing diplomats whose opinions are allowed to matter only when they agree with the Pentagon and not employing them at all is not as sharp a distinction as people may imagine. As with the distinction between drones that fire on unknown people when some poor schmuck is ordered to push a button and drones that decide when to fire all on their own, the question of whether or not you have diplomats sounds dramatic but can make little actual difference on the ground.
Farrow might partially agree with my assessment, but he writes as someone who believes that the United States responds to North Korean threats, rather than the reverse, and works nobly to "contain" Iranian pursuits of "regional hegemony," rather than strives for global hegemony at all costs.
While Obama was president, the State Department helped break all records for weapons sales, the United States bombed several countries, the U.S. and NATO destroyed Libya, drone wars came into their own with catastrophic results, serious action on the earth's climate was carefully sabotaged, and the U.S. military expanded into much of Africa and Asia. The crowning achievement called the Iran Nuclear Agreement was not some sort of advance in human rights, peace, justice, or cooperation. Rather, it was the unnecessary and pointless product of U.S. propaganda creating a false threat from Iran, belief in which may outlast the agreement.[emphasis added--LS]
A large chunk of Farrow's book is a portrait of Richard Holbrooke as a power-mad schemer but frustrated advocate for non-militarized diplomacy. This is the same Richard Holbrooke, I had to remind myself, who publicly told Congress that the State Department's job in Afghanistan was to support the military. This is the same guy who claimed that if the United States ended the war, the Taliban would work with al Qaeda which would endanger the United States -- while at the same time admitting that al Qaeda had virtually no presence in Afghanistan, that the Taliban would be unlikely to work with al Qaeda, and that al Qaeda could plan crimes from anywhere in the world, there being nothing special about Afghan air for that purpose.
Asked at a U.S. Senate hearing in 2010, the year he died, what in the world he was doing and toward what end in Afghanistan, Holbrooke repeatedly failed to produce an answer. That could explain his deathbed conversion and his final words to his surgeon: "You've got to stop this war in Afghanistan." As if his doctor could do what he refused to play any role in, or at least failed to play any role in. It's hard to picture Holbrooke as struggling for peace when we recall that this is the very same man who in 1999 intentionally raised demands to include what Serbia would never accept, so that NATO could begin bombing.
The least we can say is that Holbrooke was employed as a diplomat, a job that can sometimes involve choosing peace instead of war. And nobody replaced him. So, we now have to expect peace out of people employed to wage war.
But the notion that the State Department is now engaged in or was until recently even partially engaged in pursuing peace is difficult to swallow because no account of life inside the State Department can compare with our encounter with that life itself as it was slipped to us through WikiLeaks in the form of all those cables.
It's interesting, for sure, to read about the frustrations of those who want to actually provide humanitarian aid but whose intended recipients need to not be publicly associated with the United States due to its unpopularity. But the need to kiss up to the war makers is something we've seen in public. And the State Department cables reveal an institution dripping with contempt for humanity, democracy, peace, justice, and the rule of law.
The solution is not, I think, to shout "good riddance!" and dance on the grave of diplomacy. Though it is to get out of the way and allow the two Koreas, and numerous other partners, to engage in it unmolested. In the end, what we need is to recognize diplomacy as something incompatible with war mongering and to choose the former over the latter.
love to you and your family,
Larry
