At a time when the Trump administration has called for gutting the State Department’s budget and filled foreign-policy jobs with military officers, Farrow draws on both government experience and fresh reporting to offer a lament for the plight of America’s diplomats — and an argument for why it matters ... his wry voice and storytelling take work that is often grueling and dull and make it seem, if not always exciting, at least vividly human ... Farrow lays out the vicious cycle: 'American leadership no longer valued diplomats, which led to the kind of cuts that made diplomats less valuable. Rinse, repeat.' Yet real as these dynamics are, Farrow’s account of them comes with some omissions that skew the broader picture ... Only in the final pages, in the context of Trump’s threats to dismantle the Iran deal, does Farrow get into the years of diplomacy that yielded that agreement. He similarly has little to say about the other diplomatic accomplishments of the Obama years ... Those omissions are in themselves telling, since they reflect a deeper challenge that reinforces the dynamics Farrow deplores. Even the most towering diplomatic achievements are at best partial victories; what look like necessary compromises at the negotiating table become ripe targets for political attack when diplomats come home and present uncertain promises and half-measures to a public that prefers silver bullets and sweeping principles.

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 ... Although War on Peace doesn’t fully achieve its broadest ambitions, it offers lively writing, astute commentary and plenty of great stories, laced through with passion and outrage ... If it doesn’t entirely hang together as an argument, it still makes for enjoyable and occasionally compulsive reading: Farrow is a natural storyteller, and his empathy and imagination breathe life even into the endless, awkward Thanksgiving dinner that constitutes diplomacy. In the end, War on Peace is much like Farrow’s characterization of diplomacy itself: rich, messy and imperfect, but ultimately, more than worth it.

Is Farrow right? Has the United States turned its back on diplomacy, and on its diplomats? And if so, at what cost? Farrow makes a good case that we have, and that the cost will be high ... Farrow makes the case well that, given our recent history, Trump is not (wholly) an aberration, but a toxic extension of trends in place. In his telling, and he tells a good tale, what distinguishes the current administration is its unabashed shift from benign neglect — and quiet reliance on diplomacy — to wrecking ball ... Much of Farrow’s work, however, is homage to the late Richard Holbrooke, for whom Farrow worked as a fresh 20-year-old law school graduate. Farrow is honest about his admiration for Holbrooke, who became, in his own words, a father figure. He is equally honest about the tragedy of Holbrooke, a man who repeatedly defeated himself and his ideas ... The decline of American influence that Ronan Farrow captures in his War on Peace has already begun. When, if we come to our senses and recognize, as French President Emmanuel Macron said, that there is no Planet B, we will re-enter a global community that has largely moved on. Can you blame them?

At times, Farrow tries too hard to lighten the prose, perhaps in an attempt to make the material more accessible ... Even readers who are not foreign policy experts might wonder whether Farrow has given short shrift to some of the diplomatic successes of recent years, most notably the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and the Obama-era policy changes regarding Cuba ... But War on Peace is nonetheless a well-researched work that lays out the case for diplomatic solutions to world crises. As former Secretary of State John Kerry tells Farrow, '[I]t takes years to undo what's happening, because it takes years to build up expertise and capacity.' And that's the tragedy of the picture painted here: Commission all the surveys you want, but they won't do much good unless diplomats are around to fill them out.

With his celebrity (the son of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen), his intellectual pedigree (Rhodes Scholarship) and his remarkable experience at the age of 30 (UNICEF official, Obama administration position on humanitarian affairs for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Capitol Hill staffer), Mr. Farrow brings to his book astonishing access, and as a result, the perspectives of Henry Kissinger, Richard Holbrooke and Hillary Rodham Clinton – all three are avatars of the diplomatic arts, though reviled by rivals – are part of his outlook. (Altogether he interviewed nine secretaries of state, perhaps a North American record.) ... the theme that courses through this book is the triumph of the military perspective over the diplomatic perspective, coming to a crescendo in the Trump years ... Perhaps War on Peace should be on Mr. Pompeo’s nightstand. It won’t make for soothing bedtime reading.

The book reflects dogged shoe-leather reporting ... Farrow scored interviews with every living former secretary of state, six of whom provided on-the-record comments criticizing the severe budget-cutting imposed by the Trump administration with Tillerson's full support. Farrow gives Trump a pass of sorts by spreading the blame for 'diplomats sidelined and soldiers and spies ascendant' back to 2001. The book comes too soon to provide a full, Bob Woodward-style examination of Trump's foreign policy, but one expects to read or see more from Farrow on the subject in either of his journalistic homes: the New Yorker and NBC News.

Farrow blends analysis with vivid reportage (his portrait of Afghan warlord Ahmed Rashid Dostum, in a palace furnished with reindeer, shark tank, and Christmas lights, is classic); his firsthand recollections of State Department icons, such as the brilliant, blustering Richard Holbrooke, make diplomacy feel colorful and dramatic rather than gray and polite. Farrow doesn’t quite demonstrate how diplomacy would succeed in quagmires like Afghanistan, but his indictment of the militarization of American foreign policy is persuasive.