No one is in command. And who less, the president of the United States in his capacity as leader of the free world, a stale and obsolete title at least since 2017. This collapse already has an abundant literature, especially on the kingdom of chaos that the White House has become , under the command of an inept and lying guy. Within this genre, an authentic collection of presidential horror stories, another subgenre of enormous political and historical interest is growing, which transcends the anecdote of an erratic, despotic and corrupt president. They are the memories and biographies that tell us of the decline of the diplomacy of the United States, an elite formed by the true architects of the international order built in the last 70 years and now in full collapse.
The bibliography is already abundant and it includes names such as Madeleine Albright, Susan Rice or Samantha Power, but especially the titles that correspond to two of the most outstanding diplomats of the last half century of United States history. One is a biography, and the other is a memoir. The first is that of Richard Holbrooke, the architect of the Dayton Accords that ended the Bosnian war in 1995, the longest and most egregious of the Balkan wars. The memoirs are those written by William J. Burns, the secret negotiator of the nuclear deal with Iran, adopted in 2015 by Obama and dismantled in 2018 by Trump.
Holbrooke passed away at age 69 in 2010, and Burns, 63, now retired, chairs the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The first was ambassador to Germany and the United Nations, special envoy to numerous conflicts, especially to the Balkans, and died while he was still the presidential envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan. The second was ambassador to Moscow and Amman. Both reached the top of the State Department ladder. Holbrooke was undersecretary of state for Asia and the Pacific, and Burns was undersecretary of political affairs first with George W. Bush, and then number two in the department with Obama. Between both books, the entire diplomatic history of the United States runs from the Vietnam War to the Trump calamity.
Burns was the secret negotiator of the nuclear agreement with Iran, adopted in 2015 by Obama and dismantled in 2018 by Trump
The stories that accompany these brilliant trajectories are not only those of a decline in the international leadership of the United States, but also of his personal failure in his political aspirations. Both were trained in the wake and in emulation of the legendary names of American diplomacy, from George Kennan and George Marshall to Henry Kissinger and Jim Baker, to which they owe the 70 years of international order led from the banks of the Potomac. And both were candidates at one point for the Secretary of State, especially Holbrooke, who only served Democratic presidents and aspired to lead diplomacy with Bill Clinton, but was won first by Warren Christopher and then Madeleine Albright.
Al Gore and John Kerry's defeats to Bush in 2000 and 2004 left Holbrooke without the opportunity to play his hand. And his claims were drowned in the bad relationship with Barack Obama, who could not stand him and even bypassed him as a special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. If he were alive, he also could not aspire to an understanding with Joe Biden if he reached the presidency. There are not so many frustrations in Burns' career, more professional and away from Washington's conspiracies. But he is also someone who could have been and has not been: in his case, if Hillary Clinton and not Trump had reached the presidency. It cannot be said it was not yet, because nothing is written about the 2020 presidential election.
Vargas Llosa's question - "At what point did Peru screw up?" - also applies to the United States. Bill Burns formulates it positively and as a witness: the Madrid conference in 1991, when the Middle East peace process begins, was the culminating moment of American power and diplomacy. Then the slope began. For George Packer, a gloomy and brilliant Holbrooke biographer, the summit comes with Clinton and the decline begins with Republican partisanship with the Lewinsky case and impeachment. "Has any country ever combined so much power with so little responsibility?" Packer wonders. "And slowly," he adds, "imperceptibly first, we lost the most essential of ourselves."
Both books follow the same path of descent. Packer's is a biography narrated as if it were an autobiographical novel: the biography serves as a mirror, for the writer and for the country. As stark with the character as if it were a confession. And it is insofar as it identifies with the virtues and vices of the character, with his greatness and his miseries. This is how he justifies his narrative effort: “Our excesses and blindness were not different from Holbrooke's. He was our man. So I tell the story. So I can't get his voice out of my head. "
Packer addresses Holbrooke's life as the third part of his narrative approach to the recent history of his country, after The Door of the Assassins , about the Iraq war, and The Crumbling , about the destruction of the American social fabric. , the saga of the failure of the superpower as a military power, its citizens and its elites.
Burns is also an excellent storyteller, as was Holbrooke, a columnist and the author of diplomatic memos that have made history (especially about Vietnam). Author of The Wedding in the Caucasus , a famous diplomatic dispatch leaked by Wikileaks, he also displays his narrative talent in The Back Channel , a more critical and even practical book in his purposeful effort against Trump's diplomatic nonsense, as befits who is alive. also politically.
Our Man and The Back Channel are two stories about the difficulty of construction and the ease of sinking. Both explain very well that Trump is more a symptom than the cause. For Packer, the sudden death of Holbrooke in 2010, welcomed in Washington as if he were a king, with the competition in the duel, although in this case he was a suitor who never reached the throne, and by Obama with exasperation. who perceives glances that point to him as guilty. Burns does not want to "offer an elegy for American diplomacy", but in view of the current treatment of diplomats by the current president and the sad role played by Washington in the current epidemic crisis, both his book and that of Packer are both lamentations for a lost world.
SEARCH ONLINE 'OUR MAN'
Author: George Packer.
Translation: Inga Pellisa Díaz and Miguel Marqués Muñoz.
Publisher: Debate, 2020.
Format: soft cover (664 pages, 29.90 euros) and ebook (12.99 euros).
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'THE BACK CHANNEL'
Author: William J. Burns
Publisher: Penguin Random House (English), 2019
Format: hardcover (544 pages, 30 euros).