War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence Read online

  For Mom.

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE: MAHOGANY ROW MASSACRE

  PART I: THE LAST DIPLOMATS

  1 AMERICAN MYTHS

  2 LADY TALIBAN

  3 DICK

  4 THE MANGO CASE

  5 THE OTHER HAQQANI NETWORK

  6 DUPLICITY

  7 THE FRAT HOUSE

  8 MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE

  9 WALKING ON GLASS

  10 FARMER HOLBROOKE

  11 A LITTLE LESS CONVERSATION

  12 A-ROD

  13 PROMISE ME YOU’LL END THE WAR

  14 THE WHEELS COME OFF THE BUS

  15 THE MEMO

  16 THE REAL THING

  PART II: SHOOT FIRST, ASK QUESTIONS NEVER

  17 GENERAL RULE

  18 DOSTUM: HE IS TELLING THE TRUTH AND DISCOURAGING ALL LIES

  19 WHITE BEAST

  20 THE SHORTEST SPRING

  21 MIDNIGHT AT THE RANCH

  PART III: PRESENT AT THE DESTRUCTION

  22 THE STATE OF THE SECRETARY

  23 THE MOSQUITO AND THE SWORD

  24 MELTDOWN

  EPILOGUE: THE TOOL OF FIRST RESORT

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  ILLUSTRATIONS INSERT

  INDEX

  PROLOGUE

  MAHOGANY ROW MASSACRE

  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 St
ates. 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 portfol
io 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