Main Page | Month Archive | Library | Email Updates | RSS Feed

DIPLOMACY LESSONS: REALISM FOR AN UNLOVED SUPERPOWER
By John Brady Kiesling


Reviewed by Patricia Kushlis
MAR 29, 2007

This review first appeared on WhirledView. Brady Kiesling’s Diplomacy Lessons: Realism for an Unloved Superpower (Potomac, 2006) is a book which, as Harvard University’s veteran international relations professor Stanley Hoffman wrote in the August 10, 2006 New York Review of Books, should be required reading for anyone contemplating a career as a U.S. Foreign Service Officer. I also think it should be required reading for students of international politics and American foreign policy as well as on the list of any American concerned about the direction of our national security policies. Why? Because this readable, 277 page book demonstrates—through myriads of examples drawn from Kiesling’s own experiences to illustrate his points—the Byzantine complexities of U.S. foreign policy making, its too often tortured implementation and the short and long term repercussions when mistakes are made. In so doing, Diplomacy Lessons demonstrates the dilemmas and limitations of a career professional service and its talented members when run over and beaten down by an arrogant administration with no respect for their expertise—preferring instead to take the ill-founded “advice” of a coterie of idealistic political ideologues lacking real world experience and self-serving Iraqi con men. Together they led an inexperienced and unqualified president down the path to nowhere and caused—among other things—Kiesling to resign in protest years before his time. When I taught international politics several years ago, I described the U.S. foreign policy making process to incredulous university students who had no idea how “the sausage was made.” Eyes grew wide. Yet, none of the international relations texts I had reviewed in preparation for the class—including the one I used—provided even a hint at what really happens in Foggy Bottom, at the National Security Council or behind Embassy walls. It seems to me, therefore, that those of us who have experienced the real world of US diplomacy owe such explanations to the American public if we want our citizens to understand how the U.S. operates overseas and why it is perceived abroad the way it is. Kiesling’s new book does just that—and more because he also debunks—but sometimes supports—the underpinnings of international relations theories through real world experiences of U.S. diplomats including his own. Kiesling also characterizes the operation of the State Department and its relations with other foreign affairs agencies very well indeed. He tells of a professional service that fails to value the area and linguistic expertise of its officer corps in favor of Washington bureaucratic operatives. Exactly so. That’s the reason we have so few Arabists and Arabic linguists capable of handling this difficult language and culture at a professional level. State’s assignments and promotion policies work against both. The “end of history” foreign affairs agencies downsizing in the 1990s forced a vast majority to retire prematurely. It takes years to replace their expertise and we’re paying for it now. This is true for virtually every other difficult to learn language as well. Ambassador Monteagle Stearns documented the problem clearly in his landmark book on the U.S. Foreign Service Talking…...  -->

Call for Book Reviews The USC Center on Public Diplomacy invites book reviews submission from scholars, researchers, practitioners and professionals. To read the Call for Book Reviews, click here