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War On Peace

by Ronan Farrow, 2018

Published: 2021.03.30

Home > Book Reviews > Ronan Farrow > War On Peace

 

Photo by Wil C. Fry

★★★ (of 5)

(* Does not include 33-page preface, index, notes, acknowledgements, etc.)

 

Summary

War On Peace (you have to assume it was a play on Tolstoy’s famous title) was author Ronan Farrow’s first book, and purports to demonstrate how the U.S. has curtailed its own influence in the world (and endangered itself) by increasingly depending on military solutions to diplomatic problems and incrementally gutting the State Department.

Farrow, of course, is best known for playing himself in an episode of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. (I’m kidding, of course, though he really did make a cameo in that show, which is hilarious both with and without him.) No, Farrow is of course the son of actress Mia Farrow and famous creep Woody Allen who obtained his first college degree at the age of 15 and later worked for the U.S. State Department under President Obama and Secretary Of State Hillary Clinton. He is also widely credited for investigative reporting into sexual assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein, Eric Schneiderman, Les Moonves, and famed beer-lover Brett Kavanaugh.

For this book, Farrow not only relied on his own experience as a State Department employee, but interviewed every living secretary of state (nine of them!), CIA operatives, diplomats, alleged spies, Afghani warlords, and more. Through a series of colorful and sometimes mind-blowing anecdotes, backed by official documentation and media reports, Farrow takes the reader from Vietnam to Afghanistan to Colombia, showing how the U.S. has repeatedly and increasingly hurt its own interests by leaning more heavily on military incursions, secret CIA operations, and coverups rather than negotiation, diplomacy, and cooperation.

 

The Good

I learned stuff, which is always my primary goal in reading nonfiction.

Farrow’s writing is measured and smooth, somehow seeming both high-brow and approachable.

The sheer depth of his effort in researching this book is evident on nearly every page. It’s difficult to imagine having the level of access he enjoyed.

 

The Disappointing

My primary complaint is that I don’t think he truly accomplished his goal here, and in fact distracted himself (and his readers) from the main thesis of the book at almost every chance he got. While all the stories — about accused spies, a white British boy turned into an extremist Middle Eastern terrorist, human rights abuses in northern Afghanistan and Colombia, and more — were fascinating, gripping even, in many cases they didn’t seem to support Farrow’s theme. At least not directly or clearly. The structure of those stories seems to go like this: (1) a bad thing happened, therefore (2) it probably wouldn’t have if the U.S. had relied more on diplomats than soldiers. Throughout, I kept feeling that familiar non sequitur feeling — when the premise doesn’t (necessarily) support the conclusion.

Most of the book was non-chronological. Of course, there’s no need to constrict oneself to a chronology when one is writing a persuasive or informative piece — in general. But in this specific work, the framework is cause-and-effect, and the case that was supposed to build over time instead kept backtracking to earlier times, when the thing we just read about hadn’t happened yet. Some of the same people are mentioned in multiple situations, and it gets confusing if I’ve already read about an older version of that person and now I meet them as a younger person who isn’t aware of the stuff I just read about them. Sometimes Farrow backtracked inside a single paragraph, within a longer narrative, or (even worse) jumped forward in the middle of a sentence to mention a future time before returning to his story. There were occasional paragraphs that contained multiple years, none of them in order.

He frequently quoted multiple people within a single paragraph. I suppose it’s more a matter of style than right/wrong, but for me it just added to the confusion. If you begin a paragraph quoting, say, Secretary Clinton, and then begin a new quote within that same paragraph, the reader is supposed to assume we’re still hearing from Clinton. But instead, at the end of that second quote, we find out it was Richard Holbrooke or John Kerry or someone. This didn’t just happen once or twice; it was throughout.

 

Conclusion

The prologue, first and last chapters, and epilogue made Farrow’s case fairly strongly and clearly, showing how the ratio of funding between the U.S. State Department and our military has shifted through multiple administrations, to the point that today’s State Department is a shadow of its former self, with many offices today shuttered and many positions left open. He also showed clearly, through several anecdotes and interviews, how certain crises could have been easily avoided with just one more meeting or at least an overture of diplomacy, but instead the U.S. funded a terrorist group or sold weapons to the enemy or sent in CIA operatives to assist in war crimes (or all three).

But the regular shifts back and forth in time, jumping from one country or region to the next, the deeply interesting but severely distracting stories, and the confusing method of jamming multiple quotations into single paragraphs all conspired to make this book less effective than I hoped it would be.

 





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