War on Peace review: Ronan Farrow on the consequences of downgrading diplomacy

An English diplomat once defined an ambassador as "an honest gentleman sent to lie abroad for the good of his country". Ronan Farrow would beg to differ. It has been diplomats, he argues in this very readable account of their modern downgrading, that have made peace between nations possible. War is what happens when diplomacy is not taken seriously. The resort to military solutions constitutes a "war on peace''. He is partly right and partly wrong about this.

Farrow is right to remind us that this did not all begin under Donald Trump – he accelerated a process already well established by his three predecessors. Diplomacy has been "ailing, if not dying" for several decades. Why? Because, argues the author, "militarisation" offered apparently faster results. Diplomacy is often slow and piecemeal. Emergencies, such as 9/11, needed warriors, not diplomats.

Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, Martin Van Buren, and James Buchanan had all at one point served as secretary of state before they served as President. But none, as Hillary Clinton can attest, has become president for more than a century and a half. Farrow has interviewed her and every other living secretary of state for his book.

But he exaggerates the extent to which diplomats have been supplanted by soldiers. Indeed, Farrow might be accused of a certain fetishisation of diplomacy. The heroes in the book are men such as Richard Holbrooke, who brought peace to Bosnia (in 1995) and war to Kosovo (in 1999). Possessed of a famously undiplomatic style – in his first audience with Obama the easily irritated Holbrooke asked the president-elect not call him "Dick" – Holbrooke alienated successive Democratic White Houses, neither of which trusted him to fill the secretary of state role he coveted.

Farrow tells a compelling tale of Holbrooke's travails leading ultimately to his premature demise. The author's work for him, as a young foreign service officer (he was in his mid-20s), in numerous trouble spots, is told with refreshing candour. Holbrooke's fatal heart attack in 2010 had a lasting impact not just on Farrow but on Obama's foreign policy thereafter.

With a Nobel Peace Prize in hand, Obama went onto to make very little peace. His Libyan war (2011) helped ruin the country; his avoidance of Syria contributed to the humanitarian catastrophe there. Holbrooke's absence was felt keenly in both decisions. But it is not clear that deference to military solutions accounts for US failure in both theatres. Indeed, the opposite might be true; there was insufficient faith in hard power and an unwillingness to use it.

Trump certainly has little time for career diplomats. But then he has very little patience for advice from whatever branch of the government it comes. Military men fare not much better than diplomats in the high staff turnover of the Trump administration. He replaced H.R. McMaster, a renowned military strategist, with John Bolton, a former ambassador to the UN. In Helsinki last month he outraged Republicans by rejecting not just diplomatic advice but that of his own intelligence agencies – including the Department of Defence and the CIA.

Trump fetishises his own deal-making skills more than he does military solutions. His buddy act with Vladimir Putin flies in the face of decades of US military doctrine that sees Russia as America's number one geostrategic foe.

But his predecessors were hardly models in how to calibrate soft (diplomatic) and hard (military) power. The unpardonable sin of George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq was to use too few troops rather than too many. Obama tried to talk tough on Syria but lacked the resolve to pursue a military solution. Instead, he trusted to an ineffectual diplomacy that Assad and Putin essentially ignored. These are significant counter-arguments to Farrow's.

However, the book is more nuanced than the argument many will extract from it. Farrow, son of Mia and thus schooled in the dynamics of family warfare, does not argue that all diplomats are peacemakers and all military personnel war mongers. American history more often shows the opposite. He argues a common-sensical position: if diplomats are not trusted and their ranks purged, their political masters better enjoy an expertise and grasp bordering on the omniscient.

Ronan Farrow is a guest at Melbourne Writers Festival mwf.com.au and Sydney's Antidote sydneyoperahouse.com

Tim Lynch is Associate Professor in American Politics at the University of Melbourne. He is writing a Cambridge history of post-Cold War US foreign policy.