Derek Chollet

[The Unquiet American: Richard Holbrooke in the World] is not a classic biography but rather a collection of essays and articles about and authored by Richard Holbrooke.

Holbrooke was a fixture in American foreign policy for several decades. He is most famously known as the architect of the Dayton Accords which ended the Bosnian war. Holbrooke also served as Ambassador to Germany and the United Nations and also served as Deputy Under Secretary of State for Europe and Asia. He was widely regarded as a likely future Secretary of State. Unfortunately, he collapsed and died while serving as a special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Holbrooke's own writings are some of the best pieces in the book. They show Holbrooke's thinking evolving. Especially interesting are the lessons Holbrooke learned from Vietnam. Holbrooke's time in Vietnam showed him what the U.S. government was good at and what it failed miserably at. Importantly, Holbrooke rightly rejected the isolationism that many took as Vietnam's chief lesson.

Of particular resonance for today's debate about intervention in Syria are Holbrooke's pieces from Foreign Affairs magazine where he stepped back and considered the crisis of the day with an eye towards how the crisis fit into a much broader sweep of American foreign policy. This ability to separate an immediate crisis and weigh its broader impact on U.S. goals is sorely missed today.

A final thought, while [The Unquiet American] serves to properly place Holbrooke in the pantheon of late 20th/early 21st century diplomats it also points out a major potential weakness in the way U.S. foreign policy is created. I believe that it was [Rory Stewart] writing in the pages of the London Review of Books who remarked on how little time Holbrooke, one of America's preeminent diplomats, actually spent in foreign countries. This is a valid criticism in my opinion and indicative of a larger problem. Holbrooke spent many more years working on Wall Street and engaged in turf fights in Washington D.C. then he did in the field. It begs the question of how well Holbrooke truly understood the motivations of the people and countries that he was making policy recommendations about.

However, this is criticism of the modern American foreign policy apparatus and not Holbrooke individually. Holbrooke served his country well and this book does a fine job of memorializing that service.… (meer)