Читать книгу War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence - Ronan Farrow, Ronan Farrow - Страница 6

AMMAN, JORDAN, 2017

[A]ppoint an ambassador who is versed in all sciences, who understands hints, expressions of the face and gestures … The army depends on the official placed in charge of it … peace and its opposite, war, on the ambassador. For the ambassador alone makes and separates allies; the ambassador transacts that business by which kings are disunited or not.

—THE MANUSMRITI, HINDU SCRIPTURE, CA. 1000 BCE

THE DIPLOMAT HAD NO CLUE that his career was over. Before stepping into the secure section of the American embassy, he’d slipped his phone into one of the cubbies on the wall outside, according to protocol. The diplomat had been following protocol for thirty-five years, as walls crumbled and empires fell, as the world grew smaller and cables became teleconferences and the expansive language of diplomacy reduced to the gnomic and officious patter of email. He had missed a few calls and the first email that came in was terse. The director general of the Foreign Service had been trying to reach him. They needed to speak immediately.

The diplomat’s name was Thomas Countryman, which seems like it must be made up, but is not. He was sitting at a borrowed desk in the political section at the heart of the low, sprawling embassy complex in Jordan’s posh Abdoun neighborhood. The embassy was an American contractor’s studied homage to the Middle East: sand-colored stone, with a red diamond-shaped motif on the shatterproof windows that said, “local, but not too local.” Like most American embassies in this part of the world, there was no avoiding the sense that it was a fortress. “We’d build a moat if we could,” a Foreign Service officer stationed there once muttered to me as our armored SUV made its way through the facility’s concrete and steel barriers, past armored personnel carriers full of uniformed soldiers.

It was January 25, 2017. Countryman was America’s senior official on arms control, a mission that was, quite literally, a matter of life and death. He oversaw the State Department’s work on the fragile nuclear deal with Iran, and its response to apocalyptic threats from the regime in North Korea. His trip that January was a moonshot: the latest in decades of negotiations over nuclear disarmament in the Middle East. Nuclear-free zones had been established around the world, from Latin America to parts of Africa and Europe. No one thought Israel was going to suddenly surrender its nukes. But incremental steps—like getting states in the region to ratify treaties they had already signed banning nuclear tests, if not the weapons themselves—might someday be achievable. Even that was “a fairly quixotic quest, because the Arabs and the Israelis have radically different views.” Tom Countryman had a flair for understatement.

The work this mission entailed was classic, old-school diplomacy, which is to say it was frustrating and involved a lot of jet lag. Years of careful cajoling and mediating had brought the Middle Eastern states closer than ever to at least assenting to a conference. There was dialogue in the hopes of future dialogue, which is easier to mock than to achieve. That evening, Countryman and his British and Russian counterparts would meet officials from Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait to press the importance of nonproliferation diplomacy. The next day, he’d go on to Rome for a meeting with his counterparts from around the world. “It was an important meeting,” he told me later, “if not a decisive one.” He punctuated this with a hollow little laugh, which is not so much an indictment of the comedic qualities of Tom Countryman as it is an indictment of the comedic qualities of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East.

Countryman had landed in Amman the previous day and checked into the InterContinental. Then he went straight to a meeting with his Arab League counterpart over coffee and cigarettes. Countryman took the coffee mazboot, or black with sugar, in the local fashion. For the cigarettes, he favored Marlboro Lights, as often as possible. (A life of travel and negotiation hadn’t been conducive to quitting. “I’m trying,” he said later, before vaping unhappily.)

The next day, it was over to dinner with British and Russian officials. Not all of Countryman’s counterparts had his years of experience and relationships. The British point person had changed several times in the preceding years. His Russian counterpart had sent a deputy. That would make it harder. In high-wire acts of persuasion, every ounce of diplomatic experience in the room counted.

Diplomats perform many essential functions—spiriting Americans out of crises, holding together developing economies, hammering out deals between governments. This last mandate can sometimes give the job the feel of Thanksgiving dinner with your most difficult relatives, only lasting a lifetime and taking place in the most dangerous locations on earth. A diplomat’s weapon is persuasion, deployed on conversational fronts at the margins of international summits, in dimly lit hotel bars, or as bombs fall in war zones.

Tom Countryman had, since joining the Foreign Service in 1982, weathered all of these vagaries of diplomacy. He had served in the former Yugoslavia and in Cairo during Desert Storm. He had emerged unscathed from travels through Afghanistan and the bureaucracy of the United Nations. He’d picked up Serbian and Croatian, as well as Arabic, Italian, and Greek along the way. Even his English carried a puzzling accent from all of those places, or maybe none of them at all. Tom Countryman had a flat, uninflected voice and an odd way with vowels that made him sound like a text-to-speech application or a Bond villain. An internet troll excoriating him as “one of those faceless bureaucrats in the State Department” called it “a strange bureaucratic accent I guess you obtain by not being around real people your whole working career,” which encapsulates another facet of being a diplomat: they work in the places the military works, but they’re not exactly welcomed home with ticker-tape parades.

But this particular troll was wrong: Tom Countryman was not faceless. He had a face, and not one you’d lose in a crowd. A slight man with a flinty, searching gaze, he often wore his salt-and-pepper hair clipped short in the front and long behind, tumbling gloriously over his neat suits. It was a diplomat’s mullet: peace in the front, war in the back. (“Sick mane,” one conservative outlet crowed. “King of the party.”) He had a reputation for frank, unbureaucratic answers in public statements and Senate hearings. But he never strayed from his devotion to the State Department and his belief that its work protected the United States. In a work of fiction, naming him Countryman would have been annoying as hell.

SITTING UNDER THE FLUORESCENT LIGHTS of the political section that day in Jordan, Countryman looked at the email for a moment and then sent back the number of his desk. The director general of the Foreign Service, Ambassador Arnold Chacon, called back quickly. “This is not happy news,” Chacon began, as Countryman recalled the conversation. The White House, Chacon said, had just accepted Countryman’s resignation, effective as of the end of the week. Chacon was sorry. “I wasn’t expecting that it was about me,” Countryman remembered between puffs at his e-cigarette. “I didn’t have any idea.” But there he was, a few hours before a critical confrontation with foreign governments, getting shit-canned.

When there’s a changing of the guard in Washington, Senate-confirmed officials submit brief, one- or two-sentence notes tendering their resignations. It’s a formality, a tradition. It is almost universally assumed that nonpartisan career officers like Tom Countryman will remain in place. This is a practical matter. Career Foreign Service officers are the foundation of the American government abroad, an imperfect structure that came to replace the incompetence and corruption of the spoils system. Only career officials have the decades of institutional knowledge required to keep the nation’s agencies running, and while every administration takes issue with the intransigence and unaccountability of these “lifers,” no one could remember any administration dismissing them in significant numbers.

The president doesn’t technically have the power to fire career Foreign Service officers, just to remove them from their jobs. But there’s an “up or out” rule: if you’re not in a presidentially appointed job after a certain number of years at a senior level—Countryman’s level—you have to retire. Being relieved of this job was the end of his career; it was just a question of how long he wanted to draw it out. He opted for a quick end. It was Wednesday. When the resignation took effect on Friday, he’d leave.

They decided he’d attend the meeting with the Arabs that night. “What about the Rome meeting?” Countryman asked. It was one of the rare opportunities for the United States to press its nonproliferation agenda with world powers. “It’s important.” Chacon agreed, but the forty-eight hours Countryman had been given wouldn’t be enough for that. A less-senior officer would have to suffice in his place. “Okay, thanks for informing me,” Countryman said simply. “I’ll be coming back home.” For a man with a mullet, Tom Countryman was resistant to spectacle.

Others were less sanguine. His wife Dubravka had met him during his first tour in the former Yugoslavia and they’d had a thirty-year Foreign Service romance. She had a degree in education and talent as a painter, but she’d set aside her ambitions to move around the world every few years with him, helping to make ends meet as an interpreter while raising their two sons. Her father had been a diplomat, so she knew the sacrifices of the job—but she also understood the general expectation of respect for senior diplomats, in her native Yugoslavia and in the United States. This was something else. “It’s not fair,” she said when Countryman called her, minutes after he got the news, “and it’s not fair to me.”

She was shocked. The less-senior officer replacing him in Rome—being sent to navigate one of the world’s most treacherous multilateral issues from a position of scant authority—was shocked. The Italians were shocked. The Arabs, that night, were shocked. Countryman waited until the end of the session, after the Arabs had related the grievances (and the Arabs had a lot of grievances) they wanted addressed before they’d sit down with the Israelis. Then he told them he’d relate the results of their conversation to a successor, because this was his final meeting as an American diplomat. One by one, they took his hands in theirs and exchanged words of respect—for him, and for a shared tradition that seemed, suddenly, to face an uncertain future.

IT WAS JUST FIVE DAYS into the new Trump administration, and rumor and paranoia gripped America’s diplomats. On the campaign trail, Trump had offered little by way of specifics about diplomacy. “America First,” went the campaign mantra. He wanted to “stop sending foreign aid to countries that hate us,” though it was, at the time, unclear whether this meant development aid or military assistance or both. (“Nobody can do that better than me,” he added helpfully.)

Tom Countryman was one of many senior officials who emerged from their first meetings with the Trump transition team alarmed. “The transition was a joke,” he remembered. “Any other administration changeover, there were people who were knowledgeable about foreign affairs, there were people who had experience in government, and they had a systematic effort to collect information and feed it to a new team. In this case, none of those things were true.” He presented the transition team with detailed briefing papers on nonproliferation issues, marked “sensitive but unclassified,” since few members of the team had security clearances. But they showed little interest in nuclear weapons. What they did show was a “deep distrust for professional public servants,” Countryman said. They hadn’t come to learn, he realized with a sinking feeling. They’d come to cut.

Then the firings began. Typically, even politically appointed ambassadors in important places, especially ones without overly partisan reputations, stay on until a replacement is confirmed, sometimes for months. The Trump administration broke from that tradition: shortly after taking office, the new administration ordered all politically appointed ambassadors to depart immediately, faster than usual. Pack your bags, hit the road.

After that, the transition team asked State Department management to draw up a list of all noncareer officers across the Department. Countryman began to fear that the next target would be the contractors hired under an authority specifically designed to bring subject matter experts into American diplomacy. The Department was full of these. They played pivotal roles in offices overseeing the most sensitive areas of American foreign policy, including in Tom Countryman’s. “These were the best possible experts on issues like Korea and Pakistan,” he remembered. “And in the arms-control bureau there were a number of them that were not easily replaceable.” They were “necessary.” The United States couldn’t afford to lose them. But “the concern that they were going to dump everyone they could dump was palpable.” And so he’d spent the weeks leading up to that day in Jordan quietly lobbying State Department management, helping them devise arguments against what he feared might be a wave of firings of the Department’s experts.

In fact, that’s what he’d assumed the call was about. What was unthinkable, ahistorical, seemingly senseless, was that it would in fact be about career officials like him. Countryman insisted it was no great sob story for him personally. He had been around a long time. He had his pension. But it was a troubling affront to institutional culture. Tom Countryman had an unimpeachable record of service across Republican and Democratic administrations. He’d had a few contentious moments in Senate hearings, but they’d earned him more respect than ire. Senators “would come up to me after and say, ‘I really like the way you shoot straight,’” he recalled. Perhaps, he speculated, the administration was trying to send a message that the United States was no longer interested in arms control. Or maybe they’d gotten into his private Facebook account where, during the campaign, he’d posted criticism of Trump to a small circle of friends. “To this day, I don’t know why I was singled out.”

IN FACT, TOM COUNTRYMAN had not been singled out. The White House, Chacon told him, was relieving six career diplomats of their jobs that day. Some were more explicable than Countryman. Under Secretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy, who served around the world for more than forty years, had been involved with both the secretary of state’s email accounts and diplomatic security, and had spent the preceding year swept up in the torrent of campaign coverage of Hillary Clinton’s email server and the controversy surrounding Benghazi. David Malcolm Robinson had been assistant secretary of state for conflict and stabilization operations, a bureau with an amorphous portfolio that conservative critics said amounted to that deadliest of terms in Washington: “nation building.” But three others—assistant secretaries who worked under Kennedy and had nothing, as far as anyone could tell, to do with Benghazi, had also gotten the axe. “That was just petty,” said Countryman. “Vindictive.”

It was just the beginning. A few weeks later, on Valentine’s Day, Erin Clancy’s phone rang—the personal one she kept in a beat-up blue wooden case. She had just landed at John Wayne Airport in Orange County and was standing in the February California sunlight, in her jeans and T-shirt, waiting for a rental car. “Hold on the line,” said the scheduler. “We’re having an emergency team meeting.” The team was the deputy secretary of state’s, where Clancy, a career Foreign Service officer, was posted. She sat within spitting distance of the secretary of state on the seventh floor: through the secure crash door, past where the sagging drop ceilings and linoleum floors end and the opulent wood-paneled receiving rooms begin, in the legendary corridor of power known as Mahogany Row. Jobs on Mahogany Row were elite postings, held by the best of the Foreign Service; the Ferraris of State Department personnel, but more reliable.

Clancy held on the line. Her partner, a State Department alum, gave her a searching look. Erin shrugged: beats me. The fired officials so far had at least been in Senate-confirmed roles. Her team consisted entirely of working-level officers, and the most elite and protected of them at that. They’d assumed they were safe.

In the weeks since Tom Countryman and the other senior officials cleared out their desks, the Department had been dead quiet. By this time in most administrations, the deputy secretary’s office would be humming with activity, helping a new secretary of state jumpstart his or her agenda. In this case, the new administration had yet to even nominate a deputy secretary of state and wouldn’t for months to come. When the last deputy, Tony Blinken, was in the job, Clancy and the rest of her team had arrived at 7 a.m. and worked twelve- to fourteen-hour days. Now they sat with little to do, taking long coffee breaks at 9 a.m. each day, waiting for orders that never came. “No one’s asking us for anything, we’re totally cut off, we’re not invited to meetings, we had to fight for every White House meeting,” she remembered. “Our morning meetings were, ‘well, have you heard this rumor?’ That was no way to formulate US foreign policy.” Eventually, the acting deputy, Tom Shannon, told them they might as well take a break. So Clancy had caught a flight out of DC that morning, to see her mother.

When Yuri Kim, the deputy secretary’s chief of staff and a fellow Foreign Service officer, came on the line, her voice was solemn. “Great,” she began, in a tone that suggested this would not, in fact, be great. “Thanks everyone for your time. We just found out that we’re all being asked to move on.” The entire deputy secretary’s staff was assembled: five in the room back on Mahogany Row, two on the phone. Everyone spoke at once. “How?” they asked. “Why?” They should go to their union, one suggested. They should go to the press, offered another. “Your assignments are broken,” Clancy remembered being told. “Who knows if you have your next job, maybe you don’t. It’s utter chaos. And it’s out of the blue. No reason.”

Kim, usually a fierce advocate for her team, became mechanical. They had forty-eight hours. There would be a meeting with the office of human resources the next day to walk them through next steps. They should use the little time they had left to start making preparations.

When the call was over, Clancy hung up and turned to her partner, dumbfounded. “We’re all being fired.”

Like a lot of young diplomats, Erin Clancy had joined the Foreign Service after 9/11. She wanted to make the world safer. She moved to the Middle East for six years. She’d been in Damascus when the American embassy there was overrun by protesters. She’d narrowly avoided kidnapping. She’d worked long hours with low pay. As with Countryman, the Foreign Service officers on her team couldn’t be fired altogether. But they could be removed from their jobs. This wasn’t just a career setback. For many, it was the difference between making ends meet and not. Foreign Service officers don’t earn overtime. Instead, assignments with backbreaking hours get a pay differential, a bonus of 18 percent for the deputy secretary’s team. No one goes into this career expecting riches. Including the differential, Clancy was making $91,000 a year. But they bid on these jobs knowing they were guaranteed for a year. Many had planned their family’s lives around that income. The dismissals felt wanton and without regard for their service.

Offices across the seventh floor of the State Department were having identical emergency meetings that day. The deputy for management’s staff learned their recently departed boss would not be replaced. They too, would be let go. The same went for the office of the State Department counselor, a role some secretaries of state have maintained, and others not. According to several people present that day, Margaret Peterlin, chief of staff to incoming secretary of state Rex Tillerson, sat down in counselor Kristie Kenney’s office for their first one-on-one meeting that Valentine’s Day. Peterlin’s first question to Kenney, a veteran ambassador and one of the most senior women in the Foreign Service: How soon could she leave?

By some back-of-the-napkin calculations from insiders, the jobs of more than half of the career staff on Mahogany Row were threatened that day. At the eleventh hour, Erin Clancy and the deputy’s team got a reprieve: Acting Deputy Secretary Tom Shannon had put his foot down. They’d live to see another day. But the other teams moved on.

When I met up with Clancy, she was in her T-shirt and jeans again, sitting in the sun outside a Los Angeles café. She still had her job, but she was back home, regrouping, thinking about next steps. Maybe she should run for office, she mused—it might be a better way to make a difference at this point. Eventually, she decided to stay, going on to a posting at the United States Mission to the United Nations. She, like many still working at the State Department, wasn’t giving up. But her confidence in her profession had been shaken. “The culture of the State Department is so eroded,” she remarked. It was an institution more than a dozen career diplomats told me they barely recognized, one in which their expertise had been profoundly devalued. Squinting into the afternoon sun, Erin Clancy paused. “We are truly seen as outsiders,” she said.

Members of Rex Tillerson’s team were adamant that they hadn’t been aware of the firings, which, in some cases, took place after the Trump transition team had begun to interface with the Department, but before Tillerson was confirmed. (Other dismissals or attempted dismissals, like Clancy’s, took place after Tillerson’s confirmation.) In the first days of 2018, when I asked Tillerson about Countryman and the wave of forced retirements, the secretary of state stared at me, unblinking, then said: “I’m not familiar with that one.” A little over a month later, Tillerson was gone too: another casualty of a fickle president and a State Department in disarray.

IN SOME WAYS, the world had changed and left professional diplomats like Countryman and Clancy behind. A strain of populism that, from America’s earliest days, opposed and denigrated internationalism, was on the rise across the Western world. The foreign policy establishment that underpinned diplomatic acts of creation from NATO to the World Bank after World War II had long since disintegrated into vicious partisanship. Technology had made the work of the diplomat less meaningful and special. For the basic function of delivering messages in foreign lands, email was more efficient than any ambassador. The prestige and power of the Foreign Service were in decline.

Some of the skepticism of American diplomacy was earned. The State Department was often slow, ponderous, and turfy. Its structures and training were outdated in the face of modern tests of American influence from cyberterrorism to radical Islam. Eyes in many a White House have rolled when the subject of “State’s objections” has been raised. But for a complex set of new challenges—penetrating cultural barriers in a fraught relationship with China; pulling North Korea back from threats of nuclear war; containing a modern Iran pursuing regional hegemony—specialized experts trained in the art of hard-nosed negotiation remain indispensable. Evolving technology and a rising military offer no substitute. In these crises, sidelining diplomacy is not an inevitability of global change: it is a choice, made again and again by administrations Democratic and Republican.

“Unprecedented,” blared Foreign Policy and a host of other publications on what was being described as the Trump administration’s “assault” or “war” on the State Department. But for all the ways in which the developments were shocking, to describe them as unprecedented was simply not true. The Trump administration brought to a new extreme a trend that had, in fact, been gathering force since September 11, 2001. From Mogadishu to Damascus to Islamabad, the United States cast civilian dialogue to the side, replacing the tools of diplomacy with direct, tactical deals between our military and foreign forces. At home, White Houses filled with generals. The last of the diplomats, keepers of a fading discipline that has saved American lives and created structures that stabilized the world, often never made it into the room. Around the world, uniformed officers increasingly handled the negotiation, economic reconstruction, and infrastructure development for which we once had a devoted body of trained specialists. As a result, a different set of relationships has come to form the bedrock of American foreign policy. Where civilians are not empowered to negotiate, military-to-military dealings still flourish. America has changed whom it brings to the table, and, by extension, it has changed who sits at the other side. Foreign ministries are still there. But foreign militaries and militias often have the better seats.

These relationships are not new, nor are they inherently a negative. “America’s military might, used judiciously and with strategic precision, is a critical tool of diplomacy,” James Baker, George H. W. Bush’s secretary of state, said, embodying a more hawkish strain of foreign policy. “I’ve always said ‘diplomacy works best when it comes in a mailed fist.’” The question is of balance. In many of America’s engagements around the world, those military alliances have now eclipsed the kind of civilian diplomacy that once counterbalanced them, with disastrous results.

These trends have been apparent since 2001, but their roots stretch even further back. By the time terrorists toppled the Twin Towers, the stage had been set for this crisis of modern diplomacy for at least a decade. Bill Clinton ran on the promise of domestic reinvestment—it was, as Clinton’s strategist James Carville noted in a statement that became the indelible brand of their campaign, “the economy, stupid,”—and quickly set about slashing America’s civilian presence around the world. When Republicans took control of Congress in 1994 and Jesse Helms—he of the jowls and the racism and the fevered isolationism—became chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the nosedive accelerated. Clinton’s first secretary of state, the late Warren Christopher, championed what he called a “tough budget for tough times.” Christopher’s successor, Madeleine Albright, defended Clinton’s personal commitment to international engagement, but conceded that, in the wake of the Cold War, “there really was a sense that we needed to pay attention to domestic issues.”

Over the course of the 1990s, the United States’ international affairs budget tumbled by 30 percent, on a par with the cuts requested years later by the Trump administration. Here’s what happened then: the State Department pulled the plug on twenty-six consulates and fifty missions of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The timing could hardly have been worse. With the disintegration of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, the United States needed a slew of new outposts to stabilize the region and gain footholds of American influence in spaces vacated by the Soviets. While some were indeed created, by the mid-1990s, the United States had fewer embassies and consulates than it did at the height of the Cold War. Even remaining outposts felt the shift—Christopher sheepishly told a congressional committee that the embassy in Beijing reeked of sewer gas, while in Sarajevo, diplomats desperate to receive news had to jerry-rig a satellite dish to the roof using a barbecue grill.

In 1999, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and the United States Information Agency were both shuttered and their respective mandates folded into a shrinking and overstretched State Department. The Cold War was over, the logic went. When would the United States possibly need to worry about rising nuclear powers, or information warfare against an ideological enemy’s insidious propaganda machine? Two decades later, Iran’s and North Korea’s nuclear aspirations and the Islamic State’s global recruitment are among the United States’ most pressing international challenges. But by then, the specialized, trained workforces devoted to those challenges had been wiped out. Thomas Friedman raced to the scene with a visual metaphor, lamenting that the United States was “turning its back on the past and the future of U.S. foreign policy for the sake of the present.” (The point was certainly valid, though one wondered where the nation’s back was now facing. Maybe we were spinning? Let’s say we were spinning.)

So it was that on September 11, 2001, the State Department was 20 percent short of staff, and those who remained were undertrained and under-resourced. The United States needed diplomacy more than ever, and it was nowhere to be found.

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION SCRAMBLED to reinvest. “We resourced the Department like never before,” then–secretary of state Colin Powell recalled. But it was growth born of a new, militarized form of foreign policy. Funding that made it to State was increasingly drawn from “Overseas Contingency Operations”—earmarked specifically for advancing the Global War on Terrorism. Promoting democracy, supporting economic development, helping migrants—all of these missions were repackaged under a new counterterrorism mantle. “Soft” categories of the State Department’s budget—that is, anything not directly related to the immediate goals of combatting terrorism—flatlined, in many cases permanently. Defense spending, on the other hand, skyrocketed to historic extremes, far outpacing the modest growth at State. “The State Department has ceded a lot of authority to the Defense Department since 2001,” Albright reflected.

Diplomats slipped to the periphery of the policy process. Especially during the early days of the Iraq War, Bush concentrated power at the White House; specifically, under Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney built a close rapport with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, but had little time for Powell. “The VP had very, very strong views and he communicated them directly to the president,” recalled Powell. The Bush White House had “two NSCs during that period. One led by Condi [Rice, then the national security advisor] and one led by the VP. Anything going to the president after it left the NSC went to the VP’s NSC and the problem I’d have from time to time is that … access is everything in politics and he was over there all the time.” It was a challenge former secretaries of state invariably recalled facing, to one extent or another. “There is the interesting psychological fact that the secretary of state’s office is ten minutes’ car ride from the White House and the security advisor is right down the hall,” said Henry Kissinger, recalling his time in both roles under presidents Nixon and Ford. “The temptations of propinquity are very great.”

During the Bush administration, those dynamics cut the State Department out of even explicitly diplomatic decisions. Powell learned of Bush’s plan to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol on climate change only after it had been decided, and pleaded with Rice for more time to warn America’s allies of the radical move. He raced to the White House to press the case. Rice informed him that it was too late.

But State’s exclusion was most profound in the Global War on Terrorism, which an ascendant Pentagon seized as its exclusive domain. That the invasion of Iraq and the period immediately after were dominated by the Pentagon was inevitable. But, later, Bush handed over reconstruction and democracy-building activities, which had historically been the domain of the State Department and USAID, to uniformed officers with the Coalition Provisional Authority, reporting to the secretary of defense. Powell and his officials at State counseled caution, but were unable to penetrate the policymaking process, which had become entirely preoccupied with tactics—in Powell’s view, at the expense of strategy. “Mr. Rumsfeld felt that he had a strategy that did not reflect Powell thinking,” he recalled. “And he could do it on the low end and on small. My concern was probably, yeah, he beat the crap out of this army ten years ago, I have no doubt about them getting to Baghdad, but we didn’t take over the country to run a country.” Powell never used the phrase “the Pottery Barn rule,” as a journalist later dubbed his thinking, but he did tell the president, “If you break it, you own it.” It was, he later told me with a heavy sigh, “a massive strategic failure both politically and militarily.”

More specifically, it was a string of successive strategic failures. The Pentagon disbanded the Iraqi security forces, turning loose hundreds of thousands of armed and unemployed Iraqi young men and laying the foundations for a deadly insurgency. Taxpayer dollars from the massive $4-billion Commander’s Emergency Response Program, which essentially gave military brass the authority to undertake USAID-style development projects, was later found to be flowing directly to those insurgents. The State Department’s legal adviser is typically consulted on questions of law regarding the treatment of enemy combatants, but Powell’s Department was not involved in conversations about the administration’s expanding use of military commissions—aspects of which were later found to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

As the disasters of Iraq deepened, a bruised Bush administration did attempt to shift additional resources into diplomacy and development. The White House pledged to double the size of USAID’s Foreign Service, and began to speak of rebalancing civilian and military roles and empowering the US ambassador in Iraq. The supposed rebalancing was more pantomime than meaningful policy—there was no redressing the yawning chasm of resources and influence between military and civilian leadership in the war—but there was, at least, an understanding that military policymaking had proved toxic.

THE LESSON DIDN’T STICK. In a haze of nostalgia, liberal commentators sometimes frame Barack Obama as a champion of diplomacy, worlds apart from the pugnacious Trump era. They remember him in a packed auditorium at Cairo University offering dialogue and calm to the Muslim world. “Events in Iraq have reminded America of the need to use diplomacy and build international consensus to resolve our problems whenever possible,” he said in that speech. And the Obama administration would, especially in its second term, yield several examples of the effectiveness of empowering diplomats, with the Iran deal, the Paris climate change accord, and a thaw in relations with Cuba. But it also, especially in its first term, accelerated several of the same trends that have conspired to ravage America’s diplomatic capacity during the Trump administration.

Obama, to a lesser extent than Trump but a greater extent than many before him, surrounded himself with retired generals or other military officers in senior positions. That included National Security Advisor General Jim Jones, General Douglas Lute as Jones’s deputy for Afghanistan, General David Petraeus as head of the CIA, and Admiral Dennis Blair and General James Clapper as successive directors of national intelligence. Growth in the State Department budget continued to flow from Overseas Contingency Operation funds, directed explicitly toward military goals. Defense spending continued its rise. The trend was not linear: sequestration—the automatic spending cuts of 2013—ravaged both the Pentagon and the State Department. But the imbalance between defense and diplomatic spending continued to grow. “The Defense Department budget is always very much larger, and for good reason, I mean I agree with that, but the ratio between the two keeps getting worse and worse,” Madeleine Albright said.

Over the course of his presidency, Barack Obama approved more than double the dollar value of arms deals with foreign regimes than George W. Bush had before him. In fact, the Obama administration sold more arms than any other since World War II. When I pressed Hillary Clinton on those facts, she seemed taken aback. “I’m not saying it was perfect,” she told me. “As you made out, there were decisions that had increased military commitments associated with them.” In the end, however, she felt the Obama administration had gotten “more right than wrong,” when it came to the militarization of foreign policy. She cited, as an example, the emphasis on diplomacy that accompanied the Afghanistan review in which she participated. But that review was held up, by both State Department and White House officials, as a deep source of regret and an acute example of the exclusion of civilians from meaningful foreign policymaking. In secret memoranda sent directly to Clinton as that process unfolded and made public in these pages, the diplomat Richard Holbrooke, ostensibly the president’s representative on Afghanistan, decried a process overtaken by, in his words, “pure mil-think.”

THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION also doubled down on the kind of White House power grabs that had frustrated Powell during the Bush administration. From Obama’s first days in office, Jones, the national security advisor, pledged to expand the National Security Council’s reach. What was disparagingly referred to as “back-channel” communication between the president and cabinet members like the secretary of state would be constrained. Jones’s successors, Tom Donilon and Susan Rice, each ratcheted up the level of control, according to senior officials.

Samantha Power, who served as director for multilateral affairs and, later, in Obama’s cabinet as US ambassador to the United Nations, conceded that there were “some fair critiques” of the administration’s tendency to micromanage. “It was often the case,” she recalled, that policies made at anything but the highest tiers of the White House’s hierarchy, “didn’t have the force of law, or a force of direction. People weren’t confident it wouldn’t get changed once it went up the White House chain.” We were holed up in a shadowy, exposed-brick corner of Grendel’s Den, a bar near Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where she was a professor. Power, the one-time bleeding-heart war reporter and professor of human rights law, had won a Pulitzer Prize for her book on America’s failure to confront genocide around the world. She had long been a favorite subject of awed, inadvertently sexist journalistic paeans, which often began in the same way. Power “strode across the packed room and took a seat, her long sweep of red hair settling around her like a protective shawl,” the New York Times offered. She was “ivory-toned, abundantly freckled and wears her thick red hair long,” added the Washington Post. “Her long red hair,” Vogue agreed, was “striking against the UN’s hopeful sky-blue backdrop.” Samantha Power’s hair, through little fault of her own, shimmered its way across a decade of profiles until, finally, the feminist blog Jezebel pleaded, “Enough With Samantha Power’s Flowing Red Hair.” Power had a winning earnestness and a tendency toward authentic rambling that had, on occasion, made her a PR liability. She memorably called Hillary Clinton a “monster” during the 2008 presidential campaign. She said “fuck” a lot.

“The bottleneck is too great,” she continued, “if even very small aspects of US foreign policy have to get decided at the deputies’ and principals’ level in order for it to count as policy.” Denis McDonough, Donilon’s deputy and, later, White House chief of staff, would chastise senior officials who attempted to, as he put it, “color outside the lines,” according to two who received such rebukes. Susan Rice, according to one senior official, exerted even tighter control over policy related to virtually every part of the globe except Latin America. Rice pointed out that every administration struggles with questions of White House micromanagement. “That is ever the charge from the agencies,” she said, “and I have served more time in the State Department than I have in the White House in my career. I’m very familiar with both ends of the street. Find me an agency that feels like the White House isn’t up in their knickers and I’ll be amazed and impressed.”

But some career State Department officials said the Obama administration had gotten the balancing act wrong more often than previous administrations. Examples abounded. Policymaking on South Sudan, which was elevated to a “principals” level under Obama, often stalled when Secretary of State John Kerry or Secretary of Defense Ash Carter were unavailable to join meetings due to their numerous competing obligations. Lower-level officials were disempowered to fill the void. Meetings would be canceled and rescheduled, and weeks would be lost, with lives hanging in the balance. That, Power conceded, “should have been at best a deputies process, because, given inevitable bandwidth constraints, it was very unlikely to be sustained as a principals’ process.”

The centralization of power had a withering effect on capacity outside of the White House. “The agencies got habituated to always be coming back and asking for direction or clearance,” she reflected, as a waitress slid a plate of curry in front of her. She doused it with a shocking amount of sriracha sauce, which makes sense if you’re ordering curry at a bar. “The problem,” she continued, “is that central control, over time, generates something like learned helplessness.” The defiant, world-striding scholar-stateswoman sounded, for a moment, almost wistful. “I think people in other agencies felt that they couldn’t move.”

THE KINDS OF WHITE HOUSE CONTROL exerted by Presidents Trump and Obama were, in some ways, worlds apart. Where one administration closely micromanaged agencies, the other simply cut them loose. “In previous administrations,” Susan Rice argued, the State Department “struggled in the rough and tumble of the bureaucracy. Now, they’re trying to kill it.” But the end result was similar: diplomats sitting on the sidelines, with policy being made elsewhere.

The freefall of the Foreign Service has continued through both the Obama and Trump eras. By 2012, 28 percent of overseas Foreign Service officer slots were either vacant or filled by low-level employees working above their level of experience. In 2014, most officers had less than ten years of experience, a decline from even the 1990s. Fewer of them ascended to leadership than before: in 1975, more than half of all officers reached senior positions; by 2013, just a quarter did. A profession which, decades earlier, had drawn the greatest minds from America’s universities and the private sector was ailing, if not dying.

Every living former secretary of state went on the record for this book. Many expressed concern about the future of the Foreign Service. “The United States must conduct a global diplomacy,” said George P. Shultz, who was ninety-seven by the time we spoke during the Trump administration. The State Department, he argued, was stretched too thin and vulnerable to the changing whims of passing administrations. “It was ironic, as soon as we had the pivot to Asia, the Middle East blew up and Russia went into Ukraine … So you have to conduct a global diplomacy. That means you have to have a strong Foreign Service and people who are there permanently.”

Henry Kissinger suggested that the arc of history had emaciated the Foreign Service, skewing the balance further toward military leadership. “The problem is whether the selection of key advisers is too much loaded in one direction,” Kissinger mused. “Well, there are many reasons for that. For one thing, there are fewer experienced Foreign Service officers. And secondly, one could argue that if you give an order to the Defense Department there’s an 80 percent chance it’ll be executed, if you give an order to the State Department there’s an 80 percent chance of a discussion.” Those imbalances in usefulness are deepened, inevitably, during times of war. “When the country is at war, it shifts to the White House and the Pentagon,” Condoleezza Rice told me. “And that, I think, is also natural.” Rice reflected a common thinking across multiple administrations: “It’s a fast-moving set of circumstances,” she argued. “There isn’t really time for the bureaucratic processes … it doesn’t have the same character of the steady process development you see in more normal times.”

But, by the time the Trump administration began hacking away at the State Department, it had been nearly twenty years since “normal times” in American foreign policy. This was the new reality with which the United States had to contend. Rice’s point—that the aging bureaucracies shaped during the post–World War II era moved too slowly for times of emergency—was often true. But ruthlessly centralizing power to avoid broken bureaucracies, rather than reforming them to do their jobs as intended, conjures up a vicious cycle. With State ever less useful in a world of perpetual emergency; with the money, power and prestige of the Pentagon dwarfing those of any other agency; and with the White House itself filled with former generals, the United States is leaving behind the capacity for diplomatic solutions to even make it into the room.

“I remember Colin Powell once said that there was a reason the occupation of Japan was not carried out by a Foreign Service officer but by a general,” Rice remembered. “In those circumstances, you have to tilt more to the Pentagon.” But just as the occupation of Japan being carried out by a Foreign Service officer registered as an absurdity, the negotiation of treaties and reconstruction of economies being carried out by uniformed officers was a contradiction, and one with a dubious track record.

THE POINT IS NOT that the old institutions of traditional diplomacy can solve today’s crises. The point is that we are witnessing the destruction of those institutions, with little thought to engineering modern replacements. Past secretaries of state diverged on how to solve the problem of America’s crumbling diplomatic enterprise. Kissinger, ever the hawk, acknowledged the decline of the State Department but greeted it with a shrug. “I’m certainly uncomfortable with the fact that one can walk through the State Department now and find so many offices empty,” he said. Kissinger was ninety-four when we spoke. He slouched on a royal blue couch in his New York office, staring at me from under a brow creased with worry lines. He appeared to regard the problems of the present from immense distance. Even his voice, that deep Bavarian rasp, seemed to echo across the decades, as if recorded in Nixon’s Oval Office. “It is true that the State Department is inadequately staffed. It is true that the State Department has not been given what it thought was its due. But that is partly due to the fact that new institutions have arisen.” But by the time I interviewed Kissinger, during the Trump administration, there were no new institutions emerging to take the place of the kind of thoughtful, holistic foreign policy analysis, unshackled from military exigencies, that diplomacy had once provided America.

Hillary Clinton, sounding weary about a year after she lost her 2016 presidential campaign, told me she’d seen that shift coming for years. When she took office as secretary of state at the beginning of the Obama administration, “I began calling leaders around the world who I had known in my previous lives as a senator and a first lady, and so many of them were distressed by what they saw as the militarization of foreign policy in the Bush administration and the very narrow focus on the important issues of terrorism and of course the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I think now the balance has tipped even further toward militarization across the board on every kind of issue,” she said. “Diplomacy,” she added, expressing a common sentiment among former secretaries of state, both Republican and Democrat, “is under the gun.”

These are not problems of principle. The changes described here are, in real time, producing results that make the world less safe and prosperous. Already, they have plunged the United States deeper into military engagements that might have been avoided. Already, they have exacted a heavy cost in American lives and influence around the world. What follows is an account of a crisis. It tells the story of a life-saving discipline torn apart by political cowardice. It describes my own years as a State Department official in Afghanistan and elsewhere, watching the decline play out, with disastrous results for America, and in the lives of the last, great defenders of the profession. And it looks to modern alliances in every corner of the earth, forged by soldiers and spies, and to the costs of those relationships for the United States.

In short, this is the story of a transformation in the role of the United States among the nations of our world—and of the outmatched public servants inside creaking institutions desperately striving to keep an alternative alive.