Book Review: Ronan Farrow's "War on Peace"

"If you don't fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition ultimately." (Farrow, 2018, p. 273)--Quote by Trump's current secretary of defense James Mattis in March, 2013

The above quote references former General (and now Secretary of Defense in the Trump administration) James Mattis in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee in March 2013. For me, this blunt quote reverberates through our current era in which the Trump administration has hurt America's relationships with allies once regarded by many administrations as central to realizing Western-centered goals of facilitating the transformation of the world into a more democratic and free-trade friendly bloc. Under the leadership of Trump's first secretary of state, former Exxon-Mobil magnate Rex Tillerson, the State Department has been gutted, with recruitment down, career officers leaving in droves while Trump trashed NATO, called North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un "Rocket Man" (one in many derisive nicknames he assigns to people), and lavished Twitter praise on autocrats. Meanwhile, the budget for the military and defense collective was ballooning in an attempt to rectify what Trump viewed as a military neglected and in shambles. It is unclear what Trump's current secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, will do about the budget situation at State. But what is clear, according to former State Department official and journalist Ronan Farrow is that this trend of favoring the military over diplomacy in foreign policy is not squarely on the shoulders of the Trump administration. This story of apparent decline in traditional statecraft dates way back before 9/11 to the late 1980s and early 1990s, Farrow argues in his 2018 book War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence.

Farrow focuses on a relatively modern form of militarized foreign policy that seems to have taken root in American foreign policy circles, fueled by skepticism over the State Department's infamously inefficient bureaucracy in the face of modern challenges--from cyberterrorism to ISIL--to the rise of telecommunications technology that seems to make less special the personal face-to-face dialogues between diplomats. To bypass the ponderous State Department, administrations both Democratic and Republican have been relying increasingly on the military and intelligence agencies to broker the negotiations over everything from treaties to infrastructure development projects to wholesale reconstruction of countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. To make his point, Farrow takes the reader on a tour of American foreign policy hot-spots of Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Egypt, Colombia, the Horn of Africa, Syria and North Korea. He served under the tutelage of the late diplomatic giant Richard Holbrooke, famous for brokering peace in the Balkans in the aftermath of the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the 90s with the Dayton Accords. 

Holbrooke is painted throughout War and Peace as an annoyingly tenacious and ambitious practitioner of old-school diplomacy and a firm advocate of backing up civilian diplomacy with a dose of American military might. However, over his long career of diplomatic service, ended in 2010 with his death from heart failure, he came to agree with many other career Foreign Service officers (and even some military personnel like Mattis) that it was increasingly dangerous for American foreign policy to over-rely on military-brokered transactional relationships. Moreover, he argued for a restoration of civilian-military diplomatic balance. It was only when this happened that America was able to build beyond surface-level relationships to more sustainable ones with other countries, and with them the necessary capacity to effectively push-back against issues like terrorism. This was the case with Colombia, a rare semi-success story of modern American diplomacy offered in Farrow's book.

In Colombia, a multi-billion dollar Plan Colombia military and development assistance package--reminiscent of America's perilous counter-terrorism alliances with the Afghan and Iraqi warlords and with Pakistan's military and intelligence agencies--seemed to doom again from the beginning American objectives of development, counter-terrorism and counter-narcotics policy in Latin America. Much of the resources went to the funding and training of Colombian army units, who often then were incentivized to practice extrajudicial killings in order to secure a more firm backing by U.S. military and intelligence agencies eager to root out left-leaning rebel guerrilla and drug trafficking groups like FARC. The problem was that many of their targets were innocent civilians rather than the criminals they were supposed to be getting, and these paramilitary groups were often not held accountable. As was the case with many forays into the Horn of Africa and Middle East, the United States created a worsening cycle of violence, that, ironically, made accomplishing their goals of sustainable development, democracy, rule of law and the like increasingly difficult. 

However, the tides began to turn with American re-balancing of Plan Colombia's distribution of resources: funds were still going to the military and police to reclaim territory held by the cartels and FARC, but more money was being redirected to peacetime development projects and peace negotiations with guerrilla elements who'd terrorized the country. Notwithstanding the fact that America's over-reliance on military alliances--often anchored by hefty aid packages favoring the building of the institutional capacity of military and intelligence agencies over more democratic ones, like civilian development departments--have often created more problems for us when those armed and trained groups (with no deeper relationship with the U.S. aside from a monetary one) turn on us when their interests no longer align with ours, facilitating a cycle of never-ending violence and defense spending. But modern diplomacy, admittedly, does require a bit of both military muscle and negotiation. It definitely doesn't make sense to follow one path of inevitable cycles of violence with pure military foreign policy ascendant and civilian diplomatic capacity gutted. The loop could continue--potentially decimating us as a nation in the long-run, economically, politically and socially.

While Farrow's book jumps back-and-forth on the timeline often in order to make clear his latter argument, it still works in getting across this message. The prose was otherwise excellent, with the book reading like a novel and presenting erudite historical analyses that echo greatly in today's times, urgently calling for a renaissance of sorts in rebuilding the diplomatic capacity of the United States against a president whose brand of ascendant populism that disdains multilateralism, internationalism and expertise has exacerbated the trends of seeming decline at State. Increasing distrust of the U.S. from both allies and foes alike, borne out of disinvestment in diplomacy and withdrawal from major international pacts/treaties like the Iran nuclear deal and Paris climate agreement have created openings for rival superpowers like China and Russia to fill in the void left by America. 

However, in the end, Farrow takes a more cautiously optimistic bent. Perhaps the damage to our international standing caused by the latter disinvestment in civilian diplomacy will become increasingly obvious to the Trump administration, resulting in an about-face to rebuild our diplomatic arm of the government. The metaphorical restoration of the olive branch to the eagle's talons beside the arrows, if you will. Farrow writes in the epilogue that "the steady dissolution of the State Department under the Trump administration may appear to be a logical outcome of years of imbalanced foreign policy, but it is not an inevitable one" (Farrow, 2018, p. 295). Rather, the downward trend has been uneven, with development initiatives like the one in Colombia making fools out of those who'd prematurely called diplomacy's death for good.

Rumors of the death of diplomacy may have been greatly exaggerated, where the slow-burn process has still yielded great successes where allowed (i.e. Iran, Paris) and probably prevented immediate and costly military action. To continue in the long-term to yield positive results more often, the balance must be restored. In the modern era, we can't just rely on the military or just on State to conduct our foreign policy. We need both. We need balance to continue to prosper as a country.

Works Cited:

Farrow, Ronan. (2018). War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Book Review: Michiko Kakutani's "The Death of Truth"

Much has been made about our turbulent present moment, especially the rise of demagogic leaders who often disparage the media as a danger to the people and not to trust them and other erstwhile purveyors of objectivity: scientists, diplomats, intelligence agencies. Pundits are increasingly coining this era of rising protectionism, isolationism, xenophobia and distrust of globalization and government institutions as "post-truth," evoking the ghosts of 1984 and Animal Farm. Continuing in this vein is former New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani, with her 2018 mini-treatise The Death of Truth: Notes of Falsehood in the Age of Trump.

Unlike many of the current collection of published media, Kakutani's analysis focuses on the cultural and philosophical undercurrents of our times, drawing from a comprehensive array of fictional and non-fictional sources (Orwell to de Tocqueville to T. S. Elliot to more contemporary writers like the outspoken Putin critic Masha Gessen) to try and answer the million-dollar question: is Trump's toxic blend of authoritarian tendencies, brashness, inexpertise, pettiness, and distrust of experts unique or is representative of a historical waxing and waning of reactionary sentiment? To this end, Kakutani divides her analysis into nine topical chapters covering the manipulation of reality that comes from the corruption of language, the role of the Internet in our personal and political lives, fake news, and propaganda.

However, like the subtitle Notes implies, the chapters end up reading more like a loosely bound cataloguing of recent trends, almost a recitation of journalists' coverage of Trump's dishonesty sprinkled with literary parallels and corollaries. Kakutani treads familiar ground of President Trump's estranged relationship with the truth, but is covering so much material that the analysis becomes superficial and hurried, jumping from topic to topic. The common thread tying all these varying chapter-essays is Kakutani's interpretation of postmodernism as the driving force behind today's era of Trumpian "culture wars" (Kakutani, 2018, p. 31). A philosophy pioneered by French theorists Foucault and Derrida in the late 20th century, postmodernism rejects the concept of a completely objective reality, as human perception necessarily adds in subjectivity to how one interprets and understands their reality. Examples of variables influencing this interpretation are categories such as race, gender, socioeconomic class, ideology and the larger culture and political moment one inhabits.

Because this philosophical perspective accepts multiple perspectives as correct, more narratives from marginalized groups can be brought into the conversation, correctly so. The downside to this, Kakutani argues, is that postmodernism can be used to justify the dismissal of expertise, with language prone to being stretched and corrupted to fit multiple narratives one feels should be true: from the fact that a shady cabal of globalists is controlling things behind the scenes to the detriment of the common person to the fact that immigration is tanking the economy (both are mainstays of many of today's far-right groups) to the fact that vaccines cause autism (something that is false) or that President Obama was secretly born in Kenya (an infamous strain of dishonest and racist far-right political thought known as birtherism).

I must concede that Kakutani does have a point, that postmodernist perspectives and how they've become ingrained into our cultural and political lexicons have probably played a role in allowing fringe elements (especially those on the far-right) to weaponize it to attack the foundations of our democratic republic and others around the world: politicians are actually puppets of special interests, the federal government nothing but an overreaching, bloated, and inefficient entity, and the other political party an adversary. As with any idea, how one chooses to use it is the problem, not necessarily the idea itself (case in point: the Internet can be used as a democratizing force, to help share ideas across national borders and spark innovation and can-and is-also used to stir up instability via the spread of noxious and false ideas by state-sponsored or lone-wolf trolls alike). To me, postmodernism gets too much of a bad rap in The Death of Truth. Sure, its ideas can be twisted from producing literary masterpieces and to helping to instill a sense of multiculturalism in our society (definitely positives), for the purpose of producing and enabling demagogues by cunning individuals like Breitbart News darling Steve Bannon. Notwithstanding the latter, to me, the corruption of postmodernism and its related schools of thought are one factor of many driving today's bizarro world.

Other relevant factors, like income, racial, and gender inequality, the role of technology (from the radio to the Internet) in confusing the truth and inhibiting critical thinking, and the use of propaganda have influenced the geopolitical landscape long before postmodernism emerged, serving to cast aspersions (some of this suspicion was definitely warranted, especially in situations where this was used to fuel reformist impulses to improve those institutions) on objective arbiters of truth and problem-solving. Dictators have always played fast with the truth, promised easy solutions to complex woes, and caused untold suffering. Today's propagandists and dictatorships the world over, from North Korea to Russia to today's alt-right movements have merely co-opted an old playbook used repeatedly throughout history to shape the geopolitical landscape (and their peoples' perception of it) in order to stay in power. Us versus them attitudes and accompanying forms of toxic nationalism and militarism have been evoked repeatedly in the name of vanquishing age-old problems undergirding society that established institutions couldn't and achieving that unachievable, perfect utopia. The Internet undoubtedly magnifies the reach of fake news bots, trolls, and dictators that lead the charge against institutions at all levels of government, allowing the world's Trumps and Putins to reach more people and ultimately end up better following and reinforcing this well-worn script. Therefore, it seems a bit unfair to lay Trumpism and other similar philosophies solely at the feet of postmodernist thought when a bevy of other factors contribute to today's social, economic, political, and cultural woes.

In the end, Kakutani's The Death of Truth comes across as erudite (reflecting her well-read background), yet flawed. It is okay to feel contempt and outrage for what the Trumps of the world are doing, but to rage on about the injustices committed against the people and democratic institutions without offering an antidote merely serves to fuel the very cynicism and apathy that we all need to conquer in order to fight back on behalf of democracy. We need to do better.


Works Cited:

Kakutani, Michiko. (2018). The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump. New York: Tim Duggan Books.