day and gave rise to the most fruitful period of diplomatic accomplishment in American history. The State Department faced an existential crisis then not unlike the one that unraveled in 2017. “The American nation desperately needs and desperately lacks an adequate State Department at this hour of the shaping of its future,” screamed the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1943 copy that would splice neatly into coverage of Trump’s secretaries of state generations later. But the response was a world apart: Between 1940 and 1945, the Department modernized and reformed. It tripled its workforce and doubled its budget. It restructured, creating offices to address long-term planning, postwar reconstruction and public information in an age of fast-changing mass media.
That modernized State Department, led by a new generation of hard-charging diplomats, shaped a new international order. Those years saw the forging of a great wartime alliance between the United States and the United Kingdom, brokered by Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. The same era brought about the creation of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, negotiated between the United States, Canada, Western Europe, Australia, and Japan. It produced the “containment” doctrine that came to define US engagement with the Soviets for decades to come. Among the prominent architects of this era were six friends, later celebrated as “the Wise Men.” Two, George Kennan and Charles Bohlen, were members of the Foreign Service, the, at the time, newly formed professional organization for diplomats. In the postwar years, the Wise Men guided President Truman to what would become the Truman Doctrine, committing the United States to support other nations against the Soviets and to the massive Marshall Plan for international assistance to those nations. The same timeframe yielded the creation of NATO, championed by another member of a rejuvenated State Department, Under Secretary Robert Lovett.
The era of the Wise Men was far from perfect. Some of their most celebrated ideas were also fonts of blunder and misery. Despite Kennan’s warnings, for example, containment was appropriated as a rationale for the military escalation and conflict that came to define the Cold War. “As much as I love reading Present at the Creation,” John Kerry said of Dean Acheson’s densely detailed 800-page memoir of his time at the State Department, “Maybe history and some distance tells us that Acheson and Dulles made some mistakes out of a certainty and a view of the world that we paid for a long time, certainly in some places? In my generation, Richard Holbrooke and I both knew that the supposed best and the brightest got plenty of our friends killed in Vietnam.”
But the Wise Men had undeniable success and staying power in stabilizing the world. And diplomats of their stature, and the kind of old-school diplomacy they practiced, seem harder to find today than seventy years ago, or fifty, or twenty. “Is it the person or the role or the times?” Kerry wondered. “I see some really first-rate diplomats who have done great work … Maybe we just don’t celebrate people in government and at State the way we once did?”
Henry Kissinger argued that a broader shift had taken place: that something had changed not simply in the State Department and its relative bureaucratic influence, but in the philosophy of the American people. It was not lost on me that I was sitting across from someone with a more complicated legacy than even the Wise Men: regarded in some circles as an exemplar of the ferocious diplomat, and in others as a war criminal for his bombing of Cambodia. (It wasn’t lost on him either: he attempted to end our interview when I approached subjects of controversy.) This may have been why Kissinger tended towards the general and the philosophical. Tactics, he felt, had triumphed over strategy, and fast reaction over historicized decision-making. “The United States is eternally preoccupied with solving whatever problems emerge at the moment,” Kissinger said. “We have an inadequate number of experienced people in the conduct of foreign policy but even more importantly, an inadequate number of people who can think of foreign policy as a historical process.”
That was how the last standard bearers of the diplomatic profession found themselves, increasingly, at odds with administrations seeking political expedience and military efficiency. Kissinger pointed to the confrontation between the Obama administration and its representative on Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke: a struggle to be heard in a policy process overtaken by generals, and to apply the lessons of Vietnam in an administration fixated on innovation. “They wanted to start something new, and he wanted to apply lessons from the past,” Kissinger said of Holbrooke. Similar battles were lost by other diplomats before, and more have been lost since. But the story of Richard Holbrooke, and the disintegration of his last mission, and the devastating effect that had on the lives of the diplomats around him, provide a window into what was lost when we turned away from a profession that once saved us. “It’s one great American myth,” Kissinger added, speaking slowly, “that you can always try something new.”
THE POWER WENT OUT, as it often did in Islamabad, and the room went dark. But the laptop had juice, so the human rights activist I had come to see swung the screen around and told me to watch. A video flickered on screen. It was shaky, surreptitiously captured from a distance. Six young men stumbled through a wooded area, blindfolded, hands bound behind their backs. In typical civilian kurtas, they did not look like fighters. Soldiers in Pakistani Army uniforms led the young men to a clearing and lined them up against a stonework wall.
An older, bearded officer, a commander perhaps, approached the young men, one by one. “Do you know the Kalimas?” he asked, referring to the Islamic religious phrases sometimes uttered before death. He rejoined more than half a dozen soldiers at the other end of the clearing. They were lining up in the style of an execution squad. “One by one, or together?” asked one. “Together,” said the commander. The soldiers raised their rifles—G3s, standard issue equipment in the Pakistani military—took aim, and fired.
The men crumpled to the ground. Several survived, wailing and writhing on the ground. A soldier approached and fired into each body, silencing the men one by one.
For a moment after the video ended, no one said anything. Street traffic rattled through a nearby window. Finally, the human rights activist asked: “What will you do now?”
THE VIDEO WAS SHOCKING, but its existence was no surprise. It was 2010 in Pakistan, home to America’s most important counterterrorism partnership. Al-Qaeda’s leadership had fled American military operations in Afghanistan, evaporating into the thin mountain air of Pakistan’s untamed border country. This was the heart of the war on terror and the hunt for Osama bin Laden. As a rookie recruit to the State Department’s Afghanistan and Pakistan team, charged with talking to development and human rights groups, I found that diplomacy in the region had a quality of pantomime. Every conversation, whether about building dams or reforming education, was in fact about counterterrorism: keeping Pakistan happy enough to join the fight and allow our supplies to pass through its borders to American troops in Afghanistan. But often, the Pakistanis were unwilling (according to the Americans) or unable (by their own account) to move against their country’s terrorist strongholds.
The previous fall, there had been a rare success—Pakistani forces had staged an offensive in the rural Swat valley, seizing control and capturing Taliban militants. But it wasn’t long before rumors began to circulate about what exactly that success had entailed. Public reports were emerging of a new wave of executions in the wake of military operations in Swat. By that summer, Human Rights Watch had investigated 238 alleged executions and found at least 50 were heavily corroborated. As with everything in government, the executions even had an acronym: EJK, for “extrajudicial killings.” The issue was complex. In rural Pakistan, courtrooms and prisons were more the stuff of aspiration than reality. Some Pakistani military units viewed summary executions as the only practical way of dealing with extremists they apprehended. But the tactic