My Amazon Review of Mark Asquino's "Spanish Connections:.........."

 A Diplomat’s Life

 

 Mark Asquino has written a memoir of his 40 year career working as an information officer and ultimately as an ambassador. I admire him for having the fortitude to write his memoir. I know all too well how hard it is  because I have 70 pages written for my own memoir that has been sitting as a word file for a very long time, but I digress.

 

Mark Asquino is a child of the gritty Providence Rhode Island of the 1950’s. According to stereotype an Italian kid there was not supposed to grow up to become an ambassador. The choice then, in a cartoon version, was for him to become either a priest, policeman/fireman or a member of the Mob. Nevertheless Asquino overcame the stereotype and graduated with honors from Brown University and went on to get a Ph.D. in literature there.

 

A teaching career was not for him and by a circuitous path he ended up working for the U.S. Information Agency. In short, he worked as public information officer for various embassies.  Among his better postings were in Spain, Venezuela, and Chile. However he served in post-Ceausescu Romania, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Sudan, and finally Equatorial Guinea. Those postings could hardly be characterized  garden spots and in more than a few cases he faced imminent physical danger and he had to stand up to ruthless dictators.

 

Asquino made his bones in Uzbekistan where he was fortuitously stationed at the time of 9/11. After the 9/11 attacks Uzbekistan became a major base of operation for U.S. forces and as result it became a hotbed of political and journalistic activity. Of a sudden, Asquino became a real player. Indeed he was involved in the construction of a bridge into Afghanistan which he and his ambassador crossed over into that war torn country.

 

From there he moves up in the State Department and I learned that it takes quite a bit of lobbying for a career officer to gain an ambassadorship. Because of his interest in all things Spanish he ends up in Equatorial Guinea, which at one time was a Spanish colony. His description of this despotic country of 1.5 million people and lots of oil, makes one think of Donald Trump’s comments on certain African nations.

 

Asquino gets personal in writing about his parents, girlfriends, meeting his first wife and getting divorced. Much later, in Romania, he has middle-aged romance with Jane, a Peace Corps volunteer, who would become his wife.

 

In reading this book I got a strong sense of what life is like in the diplomatic trenches where nameless and faceless foreign service officers serve America every day. The public knows little of what they do, but their work is of the highest importance. I only wish the author had a better editor, because details are great, but too much detail can overwhelm the reader.

For the full Amazon URL see: A Diplomat's Life (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of Marie Yovanovitch's "Lessons from the Edge: A Memoir"

 

In Service to America

 

After reading Marie Yovanovitch’s memoir my respect for America’s foreign service officers has only grown. Most of the officers do not serve in glamourous capitals like London and Paris, but in out-of-the-way places where many are both corrupt and dangerous. Yovanovitch was no exception where aside from serving in London where she attended a ball at Buckingham Palace, she served in Somalia and as ambassador to Kyrgyzstan, Armenia and, of course, Ukraine. I also learned that most officers are not engaged in high policy, but rather are engaged in making sure the American embassy works on a day-to-day basis. In Mogadishu, for example, Yovanovitch made sure there was sufficient gasoline for the embassy’s vehicles, no easy task.

 

Yovanovitch is most famous for being fired by Donald Trump as our ambassador to Ukraine in April 2019 where she was a pawn in Rudy Giuliani’s intrigues to get dirt on Joe Biden’s son, Hunter. Giuliani was working hand-in-glove with the corrupt Ukrainian prosecutor Yuri Lutsenko. Several of the Ukrainian oligarchs wanted to get rid of Yovanovitch because she was supporting the anti-corruption forces in Ukraine. One of her duties as ambassador was to support anti-corruption and pro-democracy efforts in Ukraine. As a result, corrupt politician in America and Ukraine had a common interest in removing her.

 

Her removal made her a star witness in Trump’s first impeachment trial. It was here where America got to know her. Needless to say, her testimony was a showstopper. What the public did not know at the time was that her 90-year-old mother died, and she cracked a tooth leading to root canal surgery.

 

From her memoir we learn about her family who fled both Nazi and Communist tyranny and ended up in rural Connecticut via Canada where her father taught at a boarding school. We also learned that her then 88-year-old mother was with her in Ukraine while she was ambassador. She never married and the only hint of a romantic attachment she gives out was when she dated a marine guard in Mogadishu.

 

She did very well for a self-proclaimed introvert who had to attend numerous public functions and deal with various heads of state and foreign ministers. She also had to balance American interests with American values. In her view short-term interests many times prevailed over our values. Simply put it is very difficult to trust corrupt dictators who would betray us to the next higher bidder.

 

Mari Yovanovitch has written an important book describing her life as a foreign service officer and an ambassador and the lessons she learned from being on the edge and part of history. We need more people like her.

For the full Amazon URL see: In Service to America (amazon.com)

 

My Amazon Review of Martin Indyk's "Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy"

Metternich in the Middle East

Martin Indyk, two-time ambassador to Israel under President Clinton and special envoy to the middle east under President Obama, has written an homage to Henry Kissinger’s middle eastern diplomacy before and after the October 1973 war. Indyk quotes extensively from Kissinger’s “A World Restored,” a book I read fifty years ago, on the role of Count Metternich at the 1815 Congress of Vienna that established order in Europe for the next 100 years. To Kissinger the role of diplomacy is not so much as to establish peace, but rather to establish a stable order based upon the balance of power and legitimacy.

 

On becoming President Nixon’s national security advisor in 1969 and later Secretary of State, Kissinger’s goal for American foreign policy in the middle east was to get the Russians out of the region and to avoid a return to Israel’s pre-1967 borders. He succeeded in both of those tasks, but it took the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the statesmanship of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to make those goals a reality. Along the way U.S. forces had to go on a worldwide nuclear alert (Defcon 3) fearing a direct Russian military intervention in the region.

 

Indyk gives us a daily play-by-play of Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy in the region. First, by disengaging Israeli and Egyptian forces in the Suez Canal area and later the much more difficult negotiation involving the critical passes in the central Sinai. Similarly, Kissinger shuttled back and forth between Israel and Syria dealing with Syrian President Hafez Assad in negotiating a partial disengagement in the Golan area. Further Kissinger was not above being duplicitous by suggesting his ideas as coming directly from the parties involved and vice versa in search of a deal. Further, because Kissinger believed in hierarchy of power both the Jordanians and the Palestinians were largely frozen out of the process.

 

Not only did Kissinger understand the players, but he also understood the geography and the topography of the region to better understand the military situation on the ground. As a result, he created a step-by-step process whose results hold to this day.

 

On the way we meet such key Israeli players as Prime Ministers Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin, defense minister Moshe Dayan and he brings out the much unheralded role of Israeli ambassador to the United States, Simcha Dinitz. Indyk relied on recently declassified sources in the United States and Israel and the held numerous interviews with Henry Kissinger.

 

While reading this book one marvels at Kissinger’s stamina shuttling back and forth between Israel, Egypt, and Syria. While all of this was going on Kissinger had to deal with the Russians on nuclear issues, the fall of the Nixon presidency under the strain of Watergate and the collapse of South Vietnam. His plate was more than full.

 

Indyk learned the hard way that potential big deals in the middle east have a way of blowing up. He was directly involved with President Clinton’s proposals with Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat in 2000 which blew up into the second intifada and further he was involved with President Obama’s efforts in 2013 which went nowhere. His lesson is that a peaceful order in the middle east will come gradually in small steps and the lure of the big deal is pure chimera.

For the full Amazon URL see: Metternich in the Middle East (amazon.com)

 

 

A Talk on the Middle East by Ambassador Dennis Ross

On February 15 Ambassador Dennis Ross and author of "Doomed to Succeed: U.S -Israel Relationship from Truman to Obama" gave a talk sponsored by the Santa Fe Middle East Watch. Needless to say his talk opened with a discussion of the Trump-Netanyahu meeting that took place earlier that day. Ross worked with  all of the administrations from Carter to Obama on middle eastern and European issues. 

Below you find a YouTube link to his talk and I believe you will find it most informative. I am in the process of reading his book and will post a review when I am finished.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ooG3FUmUy8&t=199s

My Amazon Review of Ivan Maisky's and Gabriel Gorodetsky's (Ed.) "The Maisky Diaries: Red Ambassador in the Court of St. James 1932-1943"

Stalin’s Ambassador to London

Gabriel Gorodetsky has done an enormous public service in editing the diaries of Ivan Maisky, Stalin’s ambassador to London from 1932-43. The diaries bring to life the interwar diplomacy of Britain and Russia as they attempt to deal with the rise of Nazi Germany. It will be referenced in all future books on foreign policy of the interwar years. However, for the lay reader it a very long book (633 pages in the print edition).

Maisky working under Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov became one of the architects of Moscow’s policy of “collective security” to contain the Nazi menace. Unfortunately that policy failed and after Munich when Stalin turned towards Germany to make is separate peace. He highlights the degree of mistrust both Russia and Britain had for each other. Each feared, correctly as it turned out, that the other would make a separate deal with Hitler.

What the diaries highlight is that Maisky was among the first of the modern ambassadors who dealt with more than official government to government relations. He established a broad range of contacts outside official channels. He was very close to the then back bencher Winston Churchill and Lord Beaverbrook. Those two contacts would become extremely important after the Nazi invasion of Russia in June 1940. He was also close to such Bloomsbury group personages as Sidney and Beatrice Webb, the Shaws and H.G. Wells. On an official basis he was very close to Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, perhaps too close in the sense he probably learned stuff that would normally have been more secure.

Through his Marxist eyes he sees the rot of the British upper classes and their infatuation with appeasement and the Nazi sympathizers among more than a few of them. However, he fails to see the contradiction of his high living and numerous shopping trips when compared to the privation the Russian people were going through in 1930s Russia.

Although not directly mentioned in the diaries, he must have been living under constant stress as Stalin’s purge enveloped all of the “old Bolsheviks”   and Mensheviks who were in positions of authority. This was exacerbated by the replacement of Litvinov with Molotov in 1939 which completely recast the Soviet diplomacy that was in place since 1920. Simply put the professional diplomats were moved out and replaced with party apparatchiks.

For the full Amazon URL see:

https://www.amazon.com/review/R3IB2DAY2H3HXQ/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

My Amazon Review of Margaret Macmillan's, "The War that Ended Peace: The Road to 1914"

Having read Margaret Macmillan's "Paris 1919," which focused on the political settlements that accompanied the end of World War I, I was looking forward to her take on how the war started. I was not disappointed. Her take is especially interesting because rather than honing in on how the war started, she is more interested in how the the great European peace ended. She starts her history in 1890 when a general war was far from inevitable. However with each passing year, seemingly independent decisions narrow the options of the key political decision makers that a general war becomes practically inevitable. In her view, it is not only the broad historical forces at play, but the personalities of the political leadership that puts Europe on the road to war.

To me her story is one of great diplomatic success on the part of France, Britain and Russia and monumental diplomatic failure on the part of Germany, in particular the very erratic Kaiser Wilhelm. Look at the scene in 1890, Bismarck has France isolated, has an alliance with Russia and Austria and Germany is friendly with Britain. By 1914 France is allied with Russia and Britain. How did this happen?

First Wilhelm fires Bismarck and doesn't renew the Reinsurance Traty with Russia. France jumps in and allies itself with Russia, militarily and financially. Then France settles up colonial issues with Britain and romances her into the Entente Cordial. France is no longer isolated and Germany fears the dreaded two front war which gives birth to the offense of the Schliefen Plan. Britain's diplomacy is stunning. Ending its policy of "Splendid Isolation" it settles up with U.S. over a border dispute in Venezuela, makes a deal with Japanese in the Pacific, reaches an interim settlement with Russia over Persia and gets close to France. As a result it has a free hand in Europe without having to worry about diverting forces to protect its over-stretched empire.

How did this diplomatic revolution happen. Simply put Kaiser Wilhelm does everthing he can do to antagonize Britain. First by acting as bully in Morocco and then by starting a naval arms race with Germany. Instead of building fast cruisers and submarines, Germany builds dreadnought battleships which goes to the center of gravity of British naval power. Britain was forced to respond.

In a very important chapter of what might have been were it not for Wilhelm, Britain and Germany could have been allies.This is not far fetched.. Both countries were allied in the Seven Years and Napoleonic Wars and it would make sense for the strongest land power to get together with the strongest naval power. They have no colonial conflicts and conducted the largest bilatteral trade relationship in the world. It could have happened and if it did, no World War I.

As with all World War I histories Macmillan covers the two Moroccan crises and the three Balkan crises leading up to the Sarajevo assasination. She asserts, rightly, that the successful ending of those crises made the political leadership too complacent about the severity of the crisis caused by assasination of Archduke Ferdinand. To be sure it was summer and all of Europe's political leadership were either vacationing or away from their respective capitals, but still this was an act of what we would call today, state sponsored terrorism. What is missing in Macmillan's account is the role of the "Balkan incption scenario" highlighted by Christopher Clark's "Sleepwalkers...."

Macmillan does an excellent job in portrayiing the social millieu of Europe of the early 1900s. This was a time of rapid economic growth accompanied by the rise of socialist parties, women's sufferage, militarism and most of all nationalism creating a host of tensions. For some war was viewed as the great unifier. The role of honor becomes very important to all of the statesmen involved as the countdown to war begins in late june 1914. When honor is involved a negotiated settlement becomes difficult. It hard to compromise honor without losing face.

Macmillan has written a magisterial and very readable work of history. My one quibble is that she makes more than a few snarky comments about analogies for today. For example she writes that the German Right's fear of Russian cultural penetration of Germany is analagous to today's Republican Right's fear of Mexico. I beg to differ. Mexico is not a geopolitical rival of the U.S.; the Russia of 1914 was certainly one that Germany rightfully feared.

The URL is: http://www.amazon.com/review/R2NJJQ6AB1KBTH?ref_=pe_620760_65501210