In fact, I remember once smashing one of those large government-issued cellphones against the side of the secretary of State’s Boeing 707 in frustration after “our man” and I argued over some detail of the Kosovo diplomacy in 1999. This was different than Vietnam in an important way: Afghanistan’s terrorist network had shown on Sept. 11, 2001, what can happen when a far-away conflict comes to America. He lobbied for the Nobel Peace Prize. Is it really true that American diplomacy is no longer capable of greatness? We are still the indispensable nation, for instance, when it comes to leading our hemisphere against a regime in Venezuela that has impoverished its people and caused chaos and instability across the region and leading our European allies to contain Russia’s international aggression and contempt for the Western institutions many thought it wished to join. Holbrooke was U.S. ambassador to Germany from 1993 to 1994 and then assistant secretary of state for European affairs.One of his signature achievements was brokering the Dayton Peace Accords that ended the war in Bosnia. Yet for Holbrooke and his generation, the lessons about getting trapped in a distant and misguided war seemed more and more relevant.
And many of our successful friends around the world have grown weary of a sometimes-aggressive leadership style. At the Johnson White House, he wrote one volume of the Pentagon Papers, an internal government study of U.S. involvement in Vietnam that was completed in 1967.The study, leaked in 1971 by a former Defense Department aide, had many damaging revelations, including a memo that stated the reason for fighting in Vietnam was based far more on preserving U.S. prestige than preventing communism or helping the Vietnamese.After stints in and out of government -- including as Peace Corps director in Morocco, editing positions at Foreign Policy and Newsweek magazines and adviser to Jimmy Carter's presidential campaign -- Holbrooke became assistant secretary of state for Asian affairs from 1977-81. When it came to his peers — men like Anthony Lake, Frank Wisner, Strobe Talbott and Leslie Gelb — they were either the closest of friends or, in the case of Lake, best friends and best enemies.Especially for those of us from a younger generation of American diplomacy, George Packer’s new biography, But the book purports to be more than just a biography: This tale of Holbrooke’s diplomatic ambition and dramatic death is also intended as an authoritative historical statement about the end of an era—and a pessimistic one about the future of American power.
"This isn't bridge or tennis. The partnership with our allies was real in Kosovo, and not just a fig leaf for Washington dictating every outcome.The result of this model was an unqualified success. In my view, the model of American leadership using diplomacy backed by force that President Clinton and Secretary Albright enunciated and implemented in Kosovo—U.S. "If Richard calls you and asks you for something, just say yes," former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once said. At a refugee camp in northwest Pakistan in 2009, Holbrooke, then the top U.S. envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan, talks with a displaced man inside his tent. And in Asia, where China’s new, more aggressive leadership presents clearer dangers to the region, the openness to American leadership shows what distinguishes us from global powers of the past. He is right to demonstrate how rare it is for someone who is not secretary of State to be so dominant and prominent in American foreign policy. Indeed, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously told the Pentagon that nothing about the Balkan wars should be seen as a guide for the future. ""If you can prevent the deaths of people still alive, you're not doing a disservice to those already killed by trying to do so," he said in 1999.Born in New York City on April 24, 1941, Richard Charles Albert Holbrooke had an interest in public service from his early years. He had lunch with George Kennan, perhaps the most towering figure of postwar American foreign policy, the day his second son was born.
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