Rosa Brooks is a law professor at Georgetown University, a former State Department and Pentagon official and the author of “How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything.”
Ronan Farrow’s “War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence” is more an elegy than a work of journalism, more a work of journalism than a history of diplomacy, and more a history than a sustained analysis of the value and effect of U.S. diplomacy. Farrow’s overarching argument is straightforward: America needs diplomats, those “specialized experts trained in the art of hard-nosed negotiation”
who can provide “thoughtful, holistic foreign policy analysis, unshackled from military contingencies.” But for decades — beginning, in Farrow’s telling, with the administration of President Bill Clinton and accelerating dramatically under President Trump — America has been overvaluing the military and undervaluing diplomacy, to its own detriment.
