August 6, 2019: Please Read! It’s About Our Country and How It May Be Dying:

George Packer’s Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century

I know that my posts regarding books have fewer views than, say, the one describing all of my surgeries (you voyeur-sadists), but please bear with me: This is about the REAL patriots of our country. We need some now, as, given this past weekend, our country is clearly at risk of dying. I can’t tell you how angry I am about how our country is not only going down the shitter but how the Republicans are using their fingers to push it down the bowl.

The book is a biography of Richard Holbrooke, a great diplomat who managed to piss off just about everyone due to his endless self-promotion and appalling ambition. All he ever wanted to be was Secretary of State, but it wasn’t to be; he’d made too many enemies.

His heart wasn’t healthy, and his feet swelled and sweated horrifically, so he’d come into your office, take off his shoes, and put his feet up on your desk. Obama, who became president late in Holbrooke’s career, didn’t like him, and, when he was giving a report on a speakerphone and used a little ornate language, something to the effect of the current situation in Afghanistan being a savage juncture of life and history, Obama looked around and asked, “Who talks like this?”

Someone who started in the Foreign Service as a 21-year old in Vietnam, that’s who. He was sent to a southern province to work on the hearts and minds part, building, advising, engaging with the citizens. He met his best friend Tony Lake there, as well; they were both idealistic young Kennedy-era diplomats. Slowly, though, despite Holbrooke’s dedication to duty, he began to be disillusioned.

For some years after, he entered a political wilderness as Nixon took the presidency. He served in the Peace Corps briefly and then founded a liberal journal, Foreign Policy, till Carter brought him back as an assistant secretary of state for Asia.

But his real accomplishment was engineering the deal that ended the Balkan war in the early ‘90s. No one disputed his skill and persistence in getting thugs like Milosevic to the table and actually forcing them to agree to peace. He literally killed himself with the endless shuttle diplomacy, the all-night negotiating sessions (Milosevic liked to deliver himself of two-hour lectures on Serbian grievances), the endless hammering, hammering, hammering away at what positions the parties had to take to make peace. At the end, it’s incredible that it happened; Serbs, Bosnian Serbs, Croats, and Bosnian Muslims held too many positions that conflicted in mutually exclusive ways. Not to mention Albanians and Kosovars.

Even his detractors said that no one else could have done it. He may well have deserved the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts, as some have said, but, he was told, he lobbied too hard for it, and the Norwegians weren’t comfortable with that.

As someone who finds self-promotion distasteful, I’m no fan of a large part of Holbrooke’s life. But this man literally gave his life for his country’s interests—and make no mistake, peace in the Balkans was in everyone’s interests. We’re lucky that Russia was at a low point and not inclined to come to the aid of their Slavic brothers (as they’ve threatened on occasion, e.g., right before World War I) when NATO started bombing.

Because he disliked Holbrooke, Obama relegated him to special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan—a real comedown. He probably only had a job at all because Hillary Clinton liked him; he had counted on her winning the presidency and naming him Secretary of State.

Even then, he worked like hell, flying everywhere to forge agreement. He was convinced that a military victory was impossible (a lesson from his first posting to Vietnam), so he tried to engage India and Pakistan to speak only about how to manage Afghanistan. A sign of how intractable the conflict is: Pakistan regarded Afghanistan as their sphere of influence and wouldn’t involve India for anything. (Discussions about disputed Kashmir were right out, Holbrooke learned—that he even thought about it indicates his ambition. That India has now announced that it was changing its constitution essentially to annex Kashmir underlines the intractability of that conflict.)

Holbrooke was still worried about his mission literally on the way into the operating room where he died, in horrific pain, “his aorta shredded to his pelvis” (yikes). He was 69.

The really important theme of the book is that Holbrooke’s death in 2010 signaled the end of the American century, in one very important way: Holbrooke and Lake and their peers were, at least as far as the current State Department is composed, the last of American advocates for the post-war, liberal democratic world.

Trump’s America no longer has the willingness to act with moral authority on behalf of the Atlantic Charter signed by Roosevelt and Churchill off of Newfoundland in 1941. The Charter was to govern the post-war and guided American foreign policy for the next 60 years. Essentially, they signed on to self-determination of peoples, free trade, freedom of the seas, and a world free from want and fear. Implicit in all of this was freedom of speech, religion, and the press.

These goals resulted in the United Nations (Roosevelt’s passion) and the economic agreements at Bretton Woods, which established the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. These were tangible manifestations of the liberal democracies’ desire for a just and prosperous post-war order. (Sorry for this digression, but I find it fascinating that we, and not the United Kingdom, dictated the terms, because Britain was just broke. Brexit supporters are 70 years behind in still failing to recognize their country’s poverty and irrelevance.)

Holbrooke, Lake, and their peers in the State Department were devoted to these goals, and post-war America seemed to be as well. These goals were in American’s self-interest, as they were intended to ensure a lasting peace—and there hasn’t been a European war, anyway, since then, except Yugoslavia. Reading over the Atlantic Charter, it seems hopelessly idealistic. But as the poet said, man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a Heaven for?

Holbrooke’s reach was always exceeding his grasp. He was a real patriot, not one who proclaimed his patriotism all the time, not one who posed and postured in public. He was a self-promoter, yes, hopelessly self-absorbed, ambitious beyond wincing at, and utterly unable to see himself as others did. But he gave his life for his country. When he died, he was mourned like a beloved president. Though he didn’t know about the turnout at his services, even he would have been pleased. The death of the post-war order for which he advocated deserves to be mourned as well.