Farrow doesn’t quite demonstrate how diplomacy would succeed in quagmires like Afghanistan, but his indictment of the militarization of American foreign policy is persuasive. As Ronan Farrow describes in his downhearted but timely obituary for traditional American diplomacy, in the weeks that followed Trump’s election in 2016, a slew of America’s most experienced foreign service officers began receiving calls telling them that they were no longer needed. Farrow also has just published a new book called 'War On Peace: The End Of Diplomacy And The Decline Of American Influence.' Farrow has a remarkable personal story, too. Farrow blends analysis with vivid reportage (his portrait of Afghan warlord Ahmed Rashid Dostum, in a palace furnished with reindeer, shark tank, and Christmas lights, is classic) his firsthand recollections of State Department icons, such as the brilliant, blustering Richard Holbrooke, make diplomacy feel colorful and dramatic rather than gray and polite. The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist is best known for his reporting on allegations of sexual misconduct in high places. backed brutal warlords in Afghanistan and rejected possible settlements with the Taliban sponsored a counterinsurgency that killed countless civilians in Colombia in Somalia supported warlords and an Ethiopian invasion against a relatively innocuous Islamic regime, sparking Islamist terrorism and, in the Trump era, struggles with the damage from presidential policy-by-tweet.

New Yorker journalist Farrow, a former State Department official, examines the decadeslong waning of the department’s clout as its budgets were slashed and its diplomatic counsels ignored by presidents who pursued military solutions to global crises.

foreign policy with dire consequences, according to this searching exposé of a crumbling State Department. War has eclipsed diplomacy as the main instrument of U.S.

Ronan farrow war on peace review