When I was growing up in Catholic Ireland, books on moral and theological matters carried, near their title pages, a mark of approval from a local bishop and the phrase “nihil obstat” — a fancy Latin way of saying “all clear.” Stuart E. Eizenstat’s book on the major episodes of American diplomacy over the last half-century — from the opening of China to the invasion of Gaza — comes with nihil obstats from the secular equivalent of an entire conclave of cardinals.
It has a posthumous foreword by one former secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, and a preface by another, James A. Baker III. It carries gushing blurbs from one former U.S. president (Bill Clinton), three former prime ministers (the United Kingdom’s Tony Blair, Ireland’s Bertie Ahern and Israel’s Ehud Olmert), a galaxy of international luminaries and two further luminaries of U.S. diplomacy, Hillary Clinton and John Bolton. All of them have also been interviewed for their insights.
The improbable conjunction of those last two names — Bolton served in the administration of Donald Trump, who was, among other things, Clinton’s nemesis — is typical of “The Art of Diplomacy.” Kissinger and Baker were Republicans; Eizenstat himself served in senior positions in the Democratic administrations of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.
The book therefore harks back to an ideal of U.S. diplomacy as a nonpartisan arena, an essentially technocratic endeavor. Eizenstat is unhappy “when diplomacy is politicized” and he hopes to promote a “vision of bipartisan U.S. leadership.” Yet, if there was ever a time when it was possible to imagine an unpoliticized diplomacy, it is surely long gone. Eizenstat acknowledges, for example, that tackling climate change “will be a supreme test” of America’s global leadership. Whether that test is met depends utterly on which party is in power.
Those imperatives spring from collective values, which is to say from politics. It is especially odd that Eizenstat, who in addition to serving under Carter is the author of “President Carter: The White House Years,” mostly evades the obvious clash between the worldview set out by Kissinger in the foreword and that of his former boss, who insisted as president that U.S. foreign policy “is rooted in our moral values,” except to say that Carter’s election victory “signaled a shift away from Kissinger’s realpolitik.”
In a hagiographic opening chapter on Kissinger himself, Eizenstat writes that he “presided over some of the greatest triumphs of America’s foreign policy, as well as some of its tragic failures.” The triumphs — especially the opening of diplomatic relations with China and the making of peace between Egypt and Israel — are recounted in vivid and engrossing detail. The tragedies are swept under the thin carpet of an endnote: “For example, Kissinger’s support for Latin American dictators with egregious human rights policies; the massive, deadly, destabilizing bombing of Cambodia; continuing the Vietnam War,” and the “support for the Indonesian dictator Suharto’s invasion of East Timor.”
Millions of lives are encompassed in this endnote, and this is what makes “The Art of Diplomacy” such a frustrating book. It presents itself, in Kissinger’s words, as “a framework for conducting diplomacy.” It is actually something much narrower — a set of case studies of the conduct of specific international negotiations that reads like an extended syllabus for aspiring ambassadors. We hear about the careful dismantling of the Soviet Union around 1990 (it was important never to get Mikhail Gorbachev “to a place where he had to say no”) and the less careful dismantling of the Taliban in Afghanistan after 9/11. (Military gestures, such as an invasion, don’t make sense unless they are accompanied by “proper national security goals.”)
These studies are often fascinating and, based as they are on extensive interviews with participants like former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the former C.I.A. director Leon Panetta, they contain a great deal of useful research material.
By far the most interesting of them is Eizenstat’s firsthand account of his time negotiating with Swiss, German and Austrian authorities and commercial institutions to secure reparations and restitution for Holocaust survivors. In the 1990s, Eizenstat navigated pathways of compromise between “an unruly fractious group of class-action lawyers,” a “recalcitrant, unrepentant and uncooperative Swiss government” and the needs of victims. His account of these talks is animated by moral passion and gripping enough to make one wish he had written a more personal — and indeed a more political — book.
Of Eizenstat’s case studies, the one I know best is the negotiation of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which ended the long period of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland known as the Troubles. While his description of the deal-making is broadly accurate, his grasp of the political context is weak. Discrimination against Catholics in Northern Ireland, though systematic, was emphatically not “a form of apartheid in all but name.” It is also positively insulting to suggest that John Hume’s relentlessly pacific Social Democratic and Labour Party had a “violent fringe.” (Eizenstat seems to be confusing the S.D.L.P. with the I.R.A.’s former political wing, Sinn Fein.)
Bizarrely, he further claims that Irish American politicians, including Senator Edward Kennedy, “weighed in against U.S. involvement” in the peace process. As one of his own endnotes seems to acknowledge, the precise opposite happened. Perhaps, in trying to span such a range of situations, from Vietnam and the former Yugoslavia to Angola and Afghanistan, Eizenstat has simply spread himself too thin.
He even tries to bring the book up-to-date by adding quick (and insightful) thoughts on the Gaza crisis. He appends some of them to a chapter in which he hails the success of the Trump administration’s brokerage of a package of deals between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan. This agreement (known as the Abraham Accords) has, he writes, “transformed Israel’s position in the Middle East and the future of the peace process, integrating Israel in the region for the first time.” Immediately after this, in a short section on the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7, he writes that “Israel’s response has impeded its further integration in the region.” These terrible events make his overly optimistic conclusions about the efficacy of constricted bargains less persuasive.
Being sharp on the mechanics of negotiations but hazy on the wider political environments is perhaps an occupational hazard of Eizenstat’s search for a notion of depoliticized diplomacy. The mechanics matter but, as the horrific events in Israel and Gaza remind us, deal-making is not an art that can be practiced successfully in isolation from much larger political and moral imperatives. As much as the United States has been engaged in defusing bombs with skill and courage, it has also been involved in dropping them. A more reflective and supple account of U.S. diplomacy would pay much more attention to the complex and sometimes tragically contradictory relationship between those two activities.
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