Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya was quietly persuaded to give up its nuclear program. State can operate on much less, but it needs to be looked to. The Pentagon is going to be larger, by its nature. You’re not hearing people like Madeleine Albright argue that the budget of the State Department should be as large as the Defense Department. The much longer-term strategy - say, the question of how does a development agenda fare 10 or 20 years down the line - those are perspectives that come to the fore when you have an empowered core of experts an diplomats.

But, correctly, the job of the military is to think tactically. I don’t think that anyone in the pages of War on Peace is arguing that diplomacy is the replacement for military power. He observed that diplomacy around that issue was largely hollow, while real movement had invariably resulted from force. Nathan Thrall wrote a book about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict called The Only Language They Understand, making what may be the opposite argument of your book. I haven’t seen the research on hiring at the various agencies over time, but certainly since the end of the Cold War the State Department has been less and less of a talent magnet, and that’s had dramatic repercussions on our ability to confront a whole range of challenges. That’s a really interesting historical view. How much of this is about an organization being a magnet for talent? that the destination of choice for the best and the brightest was the CIA in the 1950s and the State Department in the 1960s, but in recent decades it’s been the U.S. I was once told - by an Army major with a Ph.D.

Ronan farrow book war on peace