Foreign Service, Five Decades on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy
by James F. Dobbins, RAND Corporation, 2017
Memoirs written by American diplomats can be slow-going. Narratives lurch from meeting to meeting in self-serving, bureaucratic prose (“And then I told the first deputy prime minister of Montenegro…”) But there are exceptions in the genre, and the late Jim Dobbins penned a sparkling one.
Dobbins was a gruff Brooklyn kid of uncommon intelligence and strong work ethic. He participated in most of the major and many of the minor American diplomatic achievements of the late Cold War and the early postwar, from junior officer attached to the Paris Peace Accords that ended the Vietnam War in 1973 through leader of the NATO mission that established peace in Kosovo in 1998.
A leading Europeanist for most of his career, he got into a dispute with a powerful member of Congress, became unconfirmable by the Senate and thus was assigned to lead a diversity of missions, including Somalia, Haiti, and Afghanistan, that didn’t require Senate approval. He transformed himself into the US government’s leading exponent of nation-building. The book ends with him paradoxically thanking the Senate for blocking his career path to further comfortable postings in favor of some of the toughest, most critical and ultimately most rewarding jobs that the Service had to offer.
What sets Dobbins’s memoir apart from those of his peers are two things. First, he describes the times and places of his service with the exquisite detail of a novelist. While at the Paris Peace talks, he witnessed the May 1968 riots and recalls a specific illuminating conversation with a French student. His memoir isn’t reliant on declassified records of conversations but rather on his and others memories (he mentions interviewing Henry Kissinger for whom he worked in 1975). Second, he delicately weaves in the policy debates of the day in a very human, direct fashion that makes one wonder how he ever got his memos cleared through the bureaucracy.
Perhaps the single best chapter of the book is “Missile Diplomacy.” Dobbins elucidates the US-USSR arms control talks of the Reagan presidency while regaling us with tales of bureaucratic battles with his Pentagon rival, Richard Perle, the “Prince of Darkness” (battles which Dobbins concedes that Perle often won, and in retrospect sometimes for the right reasons).
Then there is Dobbins the happy warrior recalling intra-State Department turf wars like the never-ending one between the bureaus of European Affairs (EUR) and Political-Military Affairs (PM).
“We in PM had been the insurgents in the hills who would occasionally swoop down to raid the peaceful EUR farmers and ride away with one or two of their issues. Now we had come to stay. What rapine and slaughter would ensue?”
Dobbins was old school. In my Foreign Service entry class in 1989, we were told of the landmark class action suit brought by Virginia Palmer and other female officers that led to needed reforms in the way women were treated, including abolishing the requirement that female spouses’ hosting abilities were a part of the male spouses’ annual fitness reports. Dobbins reports dissenting views among some Foreign Service wives at the time. They didn’t like the change and in fact appreciated mandatory recognition of their organizational skills. But Dobbins surely knew that there were other and better ways of recognizing important volunteer work. His contrarian temperament does peer out of the narrative from time to time.
Dobbins is at his best in describing the people and places of our European allies in the Cold War during the first two thirds of his career. In the last part, especially Afghanistan, he remains a master of joint civilian-military operations but loses his feel for the place. Partly this is because he is now leading hundreds of people who themselves do much of the contact work while he meets mostly the handful of Westernized elites.
It is also a fact that he knew a lot less about these nation-building places than he did about France or Germany. For instance, he mentions the anti-Taliban “Persian-speaking Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara” fighters – but the Uzbeks speak a Turkic language. He speaks glowingly of Iranian diplomat Javad Zarif, who assured him that Iran shared our opposition to al-Qa’ida. But he neglects to mention what we already knew at the time – that Tehran was hosting then (and continues to host) some of the leadership of al-Qa’ida.
After retiring from State in 2002, Dobbins went to work for the RAND Corporation, which has the Pentagon as its anchor client. “My experiences with Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan turned out to be far more relevant than my deeper exposure to issues of transatlantic and East-West relations,” he writes. During eleven years with RAND, Dobbins wrote and edited a series of books analyzing the US experience with nation-building. Though today that mission is out of favor with both political parties and the American public, Dobbins was certainly right that the US will face such challenges again. His books will remain a source of collective practical judgments on what works and what doesn’t.
I had only one chance to talk with Ambassador Dobbins, shortly before he died. In spring 2023, I published an article on nation building, and a former colleague contacted me to say Jim had liked it. She suggested a Zoom call with him. He was a spirited interlocutor and when we got around to discussing the need for institutional reforms in Ukraine to precede its economic reconstruction, he took issue with my skepticism of the European Union. They will do it he assured me.
Dobbins’ memoirs of the last years of the Cold War belong on a bookshelf alongside George Kennan’s memoirs of the early years. As a record of what American diplomacy was and has become, seen through the eyes of a young officer who becomes a policymaker, Dobbins is more relevant than Kennan. Let’s hope it serves as a model for future Foreign Service officers and not just as a reminder of what once was.
