of the book, it comes out in october and you can see what the conclusion is when it is published. this is booktv on c-span2. >> is a look at some authors recently featured on booktv's afterwards, our weekly author interview program that includes best-selling nonfiction books and guest interviewers.

>> i was in los angeles. at the time i was on channel 13 and the riots happened. we were where the studios are located and i was a member of first ame church in south-central la, a wonderful wonderful community. i wanted to be kind of with my people and i suggested to bob long, i was doing commentary on the 10:00 news so i suggest i

do my commentary that night because i knew people would gather their and mayor tom bradley was going to be there. he said you go down there now and i will send a crew in time. so i went to the church and people were coming in and it was like home. then suddenly it started getting really hairy. fires got closer, we could hear gunfire in the back of the church - was falling, cars in the parking lot, where my car was parked, covered with ash. bob long called me and that you are stuck, we can't get a crew in. it is too dangerous to let anybody in. i was standing on set with parishioners and we looked down and one guy turns to me and said how are you going to get out of here? i was the only white person

there in the congregation. and i said my car is right here. know you are not. >> afterwards airs every saturday at 10:00 eastern and sunday at 9:00 eastern and pacific. all previous afterwards programs are available to watch on our website, booktv.org. .. thank you for supporting this book i waisted -- wasted years on. >> i'm going introduce you. >> i'll shut up. i got to do my ad. welcome, everyone. i'm rick, the pressurer of harpers magazine, and the proud

part owner of book culture on columbus. [applause] >> which is the cosponsor of tonight's event and america's most radically metropolitan book store. how many of you have not yet visited the store? okay. i ask because this church and the surrounding two block radius are an amazon-free zone. [applause] >> and we depend on your patronage to keep independent book selling alive in new york, and on our beloved upper west side. you have already bought your copy of "war and peace" but we need you to keep buying books from book culture if you want to us continue to sponsor talks,

community gatherings like this one, amazon is a culture killer, a neighborhood killer, a retail store killer, and i urge you to separate donald trump's attacks on jeff bezos from the ugly reality of mr. bezos' approach to the book business. [applause] jeff bezos is a ruthless monopolies with about as much in the halve of authors and become publishers as, well, donald trump. by the way, book culture on columbus is between 81st and 82nd and we're open until 10:00 p.m. now, it's my great pleasure to introduce ronan fair farrow.

from to talk but his very important new book, "war on peace" the end of diplomacy and the decline of american influence. i'm also delighted to introduce james hogue, the former editor of foreign affairs magazine and a very important person in my life. we're fortune to have jimmer into view ronan because of his expertise in foreign policy and also because he is an exemplar of the tough, unflinching quality journalism that is rapidly disappearing in the age of google and facebook. [applause] >> i'm a lucky graduate of what i call the jim hogue school of journal jim. was a reporter for the chicago sun times when jim was editor in chief and then publisher, and much i know but journalistic

integrity applies to both reporters and publishers i learned from jim. now, we'll leave time for questions from the audience he we to the tarted 15 minutes late so we'll go until 8:15 so around 8:00. we'd like you to wry -- write down on the index cards you with given, the questions you might want to ask. raze your launched you need one now. you're not limited to diplomacy and the state department. feel free to ask about harvey weinstein and workplace sexual harassment but i hope you'll direct your questions to the arguments in ronan's book, which is a details and multilaird text that deserves a close reading. its not a coincidence that ronan is published by ww norton, one of our last great independent book companies. jim?

>> thanks so much. pleasure to be with you. >> thank you for doing this. you're also in the book, by the way, which i hope we get to. >> oh, no. >> oh, yes. he shows up in a particularly funny cameo in the book. i'll save that for later. >> host: as for harvey weinstein, that's a subject i know less about than the one we're going to talk about tonight so i'll mention him only once, and i'll mention him mainly because our author tonight won his pulitzer prize for an extraordinary set of essays about harvey weinstein and his sexual abuses and his expensive coverups, and it literally led to triggering many of the people who otherwise might not have spoken up of having done so, and really the #metoo movement got the viral start on the basis of some great deal of the work that ronan did.

but tonight we'll talk about another part ofonnan's life. he's a man of many parts. he is not only a very effective investigative reporter, he's a lawyer, and he was for a period of time a diplomat in the state department, and an aide -- an international aide at the united nations. so, he can go many different directions. what he has written here from the basis of his very enterprising life he has led, is a look at america's role in the world, how it is being transformed and why we all ought to be very careful and worried if it continues along the path it's on right now. in essence, it is that american foreign policy, american statecraft, if you will, has been through a great extent taken out of the hands of civilians, diplomats, and such, and put into the hands

of the military. now, we have some fine men in the military and some fine women, and they do a terrific job, but as i think you will see as we go along tonight, when you mesh the two completely, you lose a very important part of how you are going to play a role in the world. you may end up having to militarized and militarizings yourselves, much too early in the way events are unfolding. now, it's not a new experience. this has been going on for some time, and ronan documents this in the book. but in the 15 months or so of the trump administration, there has been a dramatic increase in what you might call the militarization of america's diplomacy. so let's start right there with a little bit of background on how this got started and why,

and what the consequences are. >> well, right now, we're seeing what gets invariably described as an assault or a war or an attack on the state department. really a purge, a firing after firing, positions that have been left standing empty all around the world, and ambassadorships unfilled in our most difficult crises around the world. but this isn't unprecedented, which is another part of the headline you see a lot. unprecedented attack on the state department. it's notten press tend in the extent we have experimented in gutting diplomacy in the past and seeing exactly what happened one you do. this is a new extreme, make no mistakes stake, but history has clear lessons on how to this play us out. as an exam, after the cold war, during the clinton administration -- everyone is passing the buck on this one.

everybody says it that the republican congress and republicans say it was the clinton white house but the emphasis was he ran on the problem of "its the economy, stupid" and a turn inwards and the 'anothers there was a 30% cut to the diplomacy development spending and it's pressie easy to track the results. we shutters two government agencies, one devoted to information, and the devoted to arms control, obviously in retrospect as we fight isis propaganda and an expanding nuclear power in north korea and another one in iran, turns out those were sets of expertise we could have used. also shutters embassies and consulates in places where we need to be establishing footholds of power after the cold war. and this is just one example of what has become a vicious cycle, late in these administrations you see people course-correcting and doubling down on dim employs

when they realize we need it but each time a new. >> player: comes in -- new power player comes in we disembauer or negotiatators and peacemakers and the clinton example is how we ended up on 9/11 with the state department that was already emaciated, unfunded, undermanned and it got a lo worse from -- a lot worse from there jim. >> but this time it's a little different, it strikes me in this senior it's not gradual. it was whole wholesale of the beginning of the trump administration. you have a story about a foreign service officer, tom countryman, and that is his real name. tell that one. >> i think i write in the book it would be annoying to call him countryman in a work of fiction because he is this great patriot but his name is really tom

countryman and he was our top official on arms control, and at a time when the administration has been saying, and told me in the course of reporting this book, our top priority is arms control, that the rise of iran and north korea is what we're focused on. they kicked out of the door our top guy on that issue, and he is one of the many stories that runs through this book, whichs is told mostly through the personal lens of the last great standard bearers of this tradition, including our mutual friend, richard holebrook, countryman book-ends war on peace and is an example of a wide-spread phenomenon chase guy with decades of expertise who gave his life for this and send in dangerous and exotic places so much so that he came back with an accent that is completely inscrutable.

i skype him as sound can like a text-to-speech application, forgive me, tom. and you look at how a career like that is played out. he is misunderstood, in the public discourse about him. you don't see a lot of honoring of his heroics. you see a lot of skepticism of a government bureaucrat, mistrust, look of understanding about what he -- a lack of forwarding what he spent decades doing and see capped off what your correct to say is a beat in this history, the wholesale -- i'll use the word -- purgeing of the states department where he and others were fired almost at once. it was month or two into the administration coming use power -- yikes believe tom was only a few days. >> one of the early ones and continued for a while, and actually several officials involved described it to me as the mahogany row mass sir.

that's where the corridor of power and he state of said's offerses and i people were given theoot o thens with the boot. >> the state department is a mundane building until you get to the mahogany row and then you feel like you're back in the 18th century for a few moments. >> with the speed hot the bureaucracy moves, you kind of are. they just discovered computers. this is the thing. the critiques of the bureaucracy are valid there are problems with the system, but every right-minded person who spoke -- that includes every secretary of state alive -- agreed that the way the cuts are happening now and the way this career is being denigrated now is not any kind of sensible reform. >> ronan talked to all nine of our ex-secretary of states and they don't agree on everything but one thing die do indeed agree is that diplomacy is under

fire at the moment if with consequences that could be painful down the road when we find ourselves ill equipped for major negotiations like with, of all people, north koreans for example. another thing about this phenomenon we should point out is that at least in my opinion, it is more ideologically driven this time than usual. people go after the state department's budget because the congress, particularly parts of the congress, love to save money regardless of the coster. but with the collapse of the soviet union, the end offering the -- end'ing of the cold war, the rein was off on spending money overseas and we have a situation where a secretary of station, may he hess in piece, mr. tillerson, not only -- [laughter] >> i think he is at a cattle

ranch with his wife and -- >> he hasn't been heard from. >> doing okay. don't pray for him yet. know we're in a church. >> but i just wish him -- he is the only secretary of state in fact probably the only government official who ever turned money from the congress down. he was offered $890 million to supplant certain aspects of his budget and decided he didn't need it. now, he didn't need it but at the same time we have at last count not an assistant secretary of state that is in office at the moment. i know there is none for southeast asia, there's none for northeast asia, and for the korean peninsula and so on. we are about to go into negotiations, first president with the north koreans and then

presuming that has some truths come from it, more formal negotiations. >> i think it's important to know, pay war on peace "addresses the possibility of leader-to-leader talks. we have heard the kind of promises we're hearing out of north korea today a lot before. this is a wiley diplomatic opponent that speaks out of bothside its mouth and without a cad dray of experts to imbed these talks in long-term strategy, there's equal likelihood that something good comes of it or that we get played, and a meeting of this kind ends up bag way to legitimize pyongyang as a nuclear power. so, the experts who labored on various failed but consequential attempts at north korea diplomacy over the year, which i

document in this book, through the stories of some of those people, like chris hill, are concerned. that we are there as in so many places, throwing subject matter expertise out of the window. >> chris hill, who ronan mentioned, is a really sue negotiator, very tough customer with a good sense of humor and is is pretty grizzled about owl of this because he has been through the mill. haven't talked to him recently how the feels about this round but i doubt it's much different, which is that you go in, you make your very best effort but you don't leave your fly open, so to speak. >> that is what is happening. we're leaving our fly open. [laughter] >> we'll walk right by that. >> that's not a good thing.

maybe we like that. >> you pointed out one thing that north korea would hadn't in an upcoming negotiation which is to be, as they have said, recognized as a nuclear power. what else is on their agenda and how realistic is any of it for things we could accepts? >> i mean, there's a lot of discussion of re ramifications of different approaches to north korea no these pages of the book. chris hill is, i think, skeptical of the ability to ever prevail in direct talks with north korea. he believes in sanctions. he believes in talks with the chinese, which he made great strides in, and those were strides he kind of through out. the obama administration just dropped the north korea project wholesale and said, we don't want to touch this, this is bad news. and i think that's one of the many historical examples -- >> what was their reasoning. >> hillary clinton, squirms is a

asked her questions about this and isn't pleased with the implication she walked away but chris hill feels she walked away and i think probe president obama was picking his battles and look as two previous administrations, under clinton and then under bush, that struck out trying to address north korea and thought, this is not something i want to take on. i didn't talk to obama about those decisions. i did talk to hillary clinton, and she sort of sputtered a little and said we supported chris hill, and chris hill said, no, she didn't. i'll leave tot those two to have that argument. the whacked is inargue bible is during the obama administration we sat on ours on -- our hand did nothing but pork know,. >> i want to talk but or militarization of the statecraft which is long-term and you have done a terrific job in this book explaining why it's about and

why we should be concerned. >> one of the most important trans-for-makes our nation undergoing and that it has really material effects an our days tonight days lives. >> that's right. >> i'll. >> i'll offer a foot know. several years ago i wrote a chapter in a book on american foreign policy having to do with the military and he role it plays, and i discovered in research i did that most major generals, most leader of the military, were ardent adherence of the fortress america concept, all the way through world war i, which was with two oceans on one side or the of us with a rather placid neighbors and we didn't need to involve ourselves in the machinations around the world, the cynical wars in europe and soing for. coming out of world war ii, marshall and eisenhower and others, sang a different song

dramatically, and it was that we were no longer able to be safe, secure, and prosperous just by sitting at home. there had been too many changes in the capable, submarines, missiles and the rest of it so the united states would have to be a forward-projecting military force. that has led to us a point today where we have bases in over 100 countries. now, that's neither bad nor good but that's how at least physically we got started down the road of having by far the world's largest and most expensive military forces in the world, and when we talk about the militarization of foreign policy, we get into such things as if you are a general in charge of egypt, and an ambassador comes in and gets off commercial flight to come to see you, but next door is an

american army airplane, with a general and all of his buddies, which one are you going to talk to, which one are you going to pay attention to? and this became quite an issue after general sisi took over after the overthrow of the muslim brother idaho, elected government in egypt. you tell that story. >> it's interesting because when you look at american foreign policy rhetoric at its best, and most noble, one of the first things we talk about is the danger of military domination in developing countries. the military junta that doesn't listen to civilian leadership is not a good thing when america talks about the world, and i'm not saying that we have

leadership by junta, but what you just said is absolutely true, that more and more often our first foot forward is an armored one. and richard hole brook, who again is -- holebrook who is the emotional back bone my mentor, spent his last days decrying an afghanistan review process that he said was overtaken by mi-think, military thinking, and talked about how in that conflict, the say -- scenario of our vibing the ambassador getting off the plane and appearing small and dingy compared to the fleet of military planes next door. he talked about that a lot. he talk about petraeus rolling

in, and he had terrible tensions with petraeus and he complained in the book but dick holebrook. bet petraeus said he called holbrooke his wing man an compliment and holbrook didn't think it was a commitment. >> holbrooke thought the wing man was petraeus, not him. richard had many qualities, one of which was a great sense of his own capabilities, which were phenomenal. >> and you were one of his best friends. >> i was indeed. and in this book it's agonizing to read what holbrook went through trying to get us on the path that might lead to some negotiated peaceful settlements in afghanistan, pakistan.

he had been successful in bosnia, if you recall, the dayton accords, and every step of the way, on the afghan and asian story, he ran into opposition and almost always from the sort of military wing of our projection into the world. >> yes. it was -- i would use the word tragic. the wonderful writer and his widow, gets very upset by people describing him as tragic because she correct lid -- correctly saw him as larger than life and vibrant and not a pushover, and all those things are true. it think was a tragedy what happened to richard hole brook at the hands of the obamas a, and the hands of these broader transformations we're talk talking about. people ask for a modern example of great diplomats making peace, and as you just mentioned,

bosnia is that. and with bosnia, he was able to array military might in the form of nato strikes behind his goals and banged his head against the wall in afghanistan, which is a very different context, more militarized set, a lot of reasons it's different, but one of those reasons is the world had changed and the united states had changed, even in that short span of time relatively short historically speaking-do and he longer had military might behind his diplomatics machinations. he was very much a fig leaf over a policy process that was entirely run by the military. and there are -- in the obama administration officials in this book who just admit to. that ben rhodes says, there was a celebrity general culture that we acquiesced to, and that he has regrets about the hey high holebrook was treated and he

ands tried to course in the second administration which is how you had a more diploma bents around the time hoff the iran deal, the cuba thaw, the paris climate change accord, but there n enough for our friend,arned richard holbrooke. >> you talked which most of us have not to all nine of our section state. tell us some of what you learned and their impressions of these people. >> i'm tremendously grateful that they gave such access. i think to a one these are men and women who earnestly believed in their country and wanted to make it a better place, went about that in very different ways. to a one i think they've all weathered a lot of controversy. maybe not george p. schultz. anybody remember a george p.

schultz. he is 97 by the time i talked to him. doesn't gave ton of interview. he was lovely to get on the phone with me and quite grumpy which i think he has earned the right to be. he is 97. he was frank and grumpy but what is happening at the state department now. its sticks with me, one thing he said, talking but rex tillerson and the wholesale evisceration of the state department now, he said, you don't have to take a job. i thought that was really point and goes to mystery of what was rex tillerson can do or think he was doing. colin powell was very moving. i think in so many ways represents a different generation of politics. >> also got beat up in office. >> tremendously beaten up. speaking of controversies. i think racks by regret, and correctly criticized in some ways but also does represent a

nobeler time in politics just as a human being. a civil, gentle guy, and and cared deeply about the work force at the state department and me business of making peace, and invested in the work force there, and as a result of that, i think is really hart broken of what is happening now. he said we are tearing the guts out of the state department. we are mortgaging your future. and that is pretty clear. he doesn't mince words. >> henry kissinger had a mold for you. if all else fails, try something new. >> so, he was really interesting talking but richard holbrooke and one point he made in that incredible bavarian pair --

baritone, and sad there and said it's one of the great american missions you can alwaysg new, as talking but a -- a general phenomenon i think leads to the sidelining of experts and veterans of diplomacy but also spinningly but what happened to richard holbrooke doering the obama administration. -- during the obama administration. an administration bent on innovation and new voices and young, bright things coming in and that's great in a lot of ways but it wasn't great for richard holbrooke and did lead to i think perhaps too much of a disregard for expertise. obviously these are all lessons it's important to med tate on right now because there's no thought of expertise right now. >> we have walked away from the

paris climate agreement, walked airplane -- walk away from the tpp -- >> trump says he is into it again. so there's that. >> he said that one day and then the next day turns it down again. >> yep. again, think goes to the point of why expert -- >> you have to be very quick what you say about trump because it's not the same after you said it. >> there's lot of discussion about how do you orchestrate foreign policy when every day there's a new tweet that is completely decoupled from anything anyone says in the government. not only is the state department getting shut down, he is notice listen to the people around him in the white house. so in some ways this is idiosyncratic to this particular president and this president's ego and this president's twitter app, but in other ways, this is an extension of a trend that has approved to be really destructive to america's safety. >> i wanted to stick on it for a

moment but we're get youth so many things. climate control agreement ask has all sorts of other -- in affect think we're the only ones that have. so that's a lot of nations on one side of the ledger and just us on the other. tpp is not much different either. only us who got out of it, and the chinese got into it, and n our place. we now have a major, if not negotiation, we have a major decision coming up in may and that is whether to resetter identify the iranian nuclear deal. now, if the president -- and i qualify this since, as i say, what he says on monday may not but what he says on tuesday but what he said during the campaign, said several times since, his number one priority is to overturn the agreement that we and several european powers made with the iranian

government to shut down for a 15-year period of time their nuclear practice if that were to happen, imagine that soon thereafter we're into more fully negotiations with the north korea begans and on what? on nuclearization again. what are your thoughts on how dangerous the situation are we headed into, how much do you weigh you give to what trump has said versus what he might do, which might be different. >> i think every sane expert with an understand offering the region has concerns about this. there are legitimate sourceses of controversy, the architects of the iran deal, many of his stories are in this book -- are the first admit it's imperfect. wasn't designed to be perfect. wasn't designed to address iran's general status as a rogue nation, wasn't designed to address their abysmal human

right track record or their nonnuclear ballistic missile test or a whole variety of issues, but it did effective live address nuclear expansion, and a lot of those architects of the iran day strain to see how we would be better off in any of the other issues in this question of, iran's human rights behavior, any of those conversations, if we still had iran's nuclear expansion on the table at the same time. so they made this decision to just target this one narrow band of iran's behavior as a starting point, and the entire world got behind it and in the view of every single one of our allies, iran has not cheated and was arrested what was an out of control process and it stands as one of the great examples of our doing business to curtail a rogue regime, and you correctly point out that one of the big

threats that the proponents of the iran deal are worried about is what is north korea thinking if we unilaterally go back on our word on the one example of having done this before? why would they have any incentive to come to the table at all or trust us on striking any deal if we, again, unilaterally undermine this thing, because much as we have tried under this administration to make cheating arguments work, say that iran did the wrong thing first -- no one has budget it. so we back out of this it will look like the united states backing out of it by ourselves. it will drive a wedge between us and our allies, allow other leadership on the world stage to take the foron this -- for on this and have ramifications for our ability to talk to north korea. >> in trump immediately said i'll be happy to meet with your

rocket man. so with the negotiation -- >> i think the full name is little rocket man. >> that's right. that's the full title. so the negotiations if they're going to be, they starts off with our -- with the top men already there, almost no room for change and so forth. much more consequence if itself doesn't work. how concerned are you about the way we're approaching this? >> i think that -- as i said before, these kinds of meetings may well have place in a considered diplomatics strategy, but that's not what is happening here and north korea is a slippery opponent, and said says a lot of things is doesn't hold to and there's a real risk of getting played, and that's particularly true if you don't have any experts supporting

these kinds of talks and imbedding them in a longer term strategy. so, time will tell what this means, and not just the short term but the decade after, and it doesn't inspire confidence that it is not being undertaken in a careful strategic way. >> the items going to be traded back and forth, if trading goes on, are not incon shen -- inconsequential. they're huge. based on what we have gathered the north koreans want a peace treaty. never been one since the korean war. they want a reduction of america's presence in the far east, which means probably the removal of some 35,000 troops from south korea, and an end to our spring war-like -- war exercises that we do with south koreans. there may be more about those are the three big items.

and recognition as a nuclear power. in other words, not some small, measly dispatched country but a major country. what do you think we could accept if any of that, and what in return do we want from them? >> obviously recognizing pyongyang as nuclear power is a nonstarter, and that is why we haven't sprung for this kind of a conversation leaders to leader in the past. again, i think one of the lessons of the stories that i tell in this book and of people like richard holbrooke is you never stop talking to the other side, but you have to be tough and strategic about it, and i don't know there's any indication that there's a single subject matter expert crafting trump's approach here or, again, imbedding it in anything longer term than just, let's get the pr

boost of having the meeting. i hope that's wrong; that the thing but flying by the seat of your pantses and having leaderless foreign policy, without any diplomats, is -- could be good or bad. one of dave it's good, net next day it's not good only time will tell, but this is not the way to approach the problem. >> only time will tell but a very dangerous time -- >> playing with fire. >> as you point out, we have put together a group of sort of north korean specialists, headed up by a man named kim of all things, that is completely disbanded. there's nobody in the state department left of that. in fact that level of senior state department people with many years experience and broad experience, has been diminished to almost nonexistence. >> in a nice stroke of irony,

the individual who was in charge of that north korea unit, while chris hill, the diploma was mentioned before was running six, party talks under condoleezza rice, a career diplomat named eury kim, show us up in two places in par way on peace" during the north korea talks go into a nuclear plant that was getting shut down because the north koreans did agree do that and we bread some headway, and then the a ooh place she shows ups as the chief of staff of the deputy secretary of state having to make the calls telling everyone they were fired in the first days of the trump administration. >> we talked sort of in the abstract about the militarization of america's statecraft. hough about the substance of it? for example, would have happened anyway or because of the president's particular feelings or is it part of militarization that we no longer have high

priority to human rights or to the promotion of democracy around the world? >> that's a very complicated question. i would not say that the military doesn't care about human rights or necessarily that civilian diplomat leadership means a better track record on human rights but i think it is fire say that when you have policies crafted in the name of tactical experience, very often human rising is one honever first things on the chopping block. i talk about how in the days of 9/11 we air drap dropped in could lash guns to the war lords in afghan because they were on him in enemy's enemy and they

took a bunch of strong hodses and you ended inwith the terrible atrocities, mass graves, and then because we laid down with these guys and then subsequently, again, because there were no diplomats running the thing or imbedding any of this in a strategy, we were just installing these guy friday into new power structures we created so the war lords became ministers and got fat subsidize from the united states and engaged in same kind of corruption and human right abuse we had seen before and we had really no levers of power over them. i mentioned those mass graves. there's one in particular that was an unsolve mystery for years and years, and i sort of became obsessed with when is was a human rights official state department, and nothing wanted d to hear it. under the obama administration it was just another problem they didn't want to deal with. had been covered up during the bush administration,ary investigation was sidelined or

conducted and then sealed, and i actually in the book i go out and hang out with this guy, general dostum, warlord, and trying to get him to answer questions. >> there is a war lord and a rather speck darkly. >> the this war lord's war lord, same he is descend from genghis khan, as shark tank. >> you described his mansion in the capital as half -- i think i say a cross between a james bond villain's layer and lib -- liberace's dressing room. a lot of flighting lights and pores lean figurines include like. >> all very fun until you hear what he did. he killed thousands of people.

>> yeah. its seems like he did. >> not nice killings. he took good deal of pleasure out of it all and still around. he is a very flexible -- >> still the vice president of afghanistan thanks to us. >> that's the kind of people you have to deal with in international affairs. our question is are way having to be more tolerances of really bad actsors if our foreign policy is more oreend towards force and militarization than otherwise would be the case? >> again, in all these areas the answer is, shades of gray, but die think there is some truth to the fact that in conflict after conflict, when we have these entrenched relationships with war lords lords and strong men,u end up with a narrower aperture of policy, and one thing that gets sacrificed is any alternatives, and sometimes that goes as far as literally

sabotaging diplomatic opportunities. talk but through horn of africa we lad similar relationships with war lords and worked behind the scenes to kill a regional peacekeeping deal bought we thought it would get in the way of our guys arming arming in mo. that happened over and over again where basically we don't have diplomats in the room, and so the opportunities to make peace go out of the window. >> we mentioned a couple of the big crises that are coming rather fast. north korea, and iran. but another one which is already in front of us is this percolating middle east which has one after another sort of rivalry breaking loses every once in a while. the one at the most causing the most problems is syria, in which

we have gotten engaged again and the question is, do we know what we're doing? a number of troops we're sending worth it? what is our stake in the syrian revolution or civil war? why should we be concerned beyond lieu map tarean concerns. >> syria policy has been a mess for a variety of reasons that got o's then he -- one consequence of us not having a coherent center of power in which we run our syria policy is we decide let the pentagon and the cia run amok for a long time. there's a period that it describe in the book where you basically just had the pentagon and the cia running completely conflicting sets of proxy wars on the ground, and backing two

different factions that were at each other's throatses and then additionally backing the turks and you had firefights in syria a year ago where we lad three fantastics we were arming all attacking each other. this is a mess and exactly the kind of policy that would be helped by having a richard hole brooke type at the helm, someone with the force of personality and depth of expertise to corralling extra. >> we have elections coming up and we also have a rick macarthur coming up. >> yeah. index cards collected. so can everybody push their card towards the aisle? >> and can someone look up james hogue in the index so i can read you the passage about him. you know what it is, right?

>> i do. >> one of the great figures of foreign policy commentary but i think it's worth reading and embarrassing anecdote. it's 119. does anyone want to hand me a copy? all right. thank you, mam. we'll get -- as we get to the questions -- people are lining up -- i'll turn to 119 here. >> these are questions? >> here's hurrying now i. >> i'm going read you a passage, not fast enough, mr. hogue. it was during this period that hole brooke and i had our knock down dragout sessions that left for donna in tears. it's temperature communications had been preare per funk tori in the weeks since, their kind of chill was routine for those who worked for richmond holbrooke

year after year, i counseled hid closest assistants in tearful low opinions in his equally volatile relationships with him. in the final days of november as the first conversations with arod came together i ran into holbrooke in the hall weaponeer the cafeteria, growers leaving? i've just been sworn into the new york barclay had been studying for. don't practice. that's a whole lot of nothing. he smiled at me, deep lines creasing around his blue eyes. anyway, you're just getting warmed up. on december 8 he killed in a favor. his friend, james hogue, was being honored at an event that night. he planned to roast him. could i find an article from, quote, sometime in the 1970s making fun of him for being too handsome. his memory was, as u, -- after several hours hassling staffers at the library of congress i tracked down an esquire profile

of hogue from september 1979 entitles the dangers of being too good looking. i fantasticked a copy to high school brooke. terrific work, ronan, he e-mailed. i knew if anyone could do it was you. it was just what i needed temp last e-mail i ever got from him. >> -- [inaudible] >> i was saying that was my going away party after 18 years of running foreign affairs magazine, and richard holbrooke, who had within for me a number of times and was a good friend, came up from washington and i hate to say it but that was the last time i ever saw him, the last meal he ever had out on the town so to speak. and i. at the time giving him the guts uncle talk on the side.

said for christ sake, richard you look like hell. usually do but you really look like hell now. go home and get some sleep. and he said i got to plane at 6:00 to catch to get back to washington. now that wasn't unusual. he was always on 6:00 flights, and midnight flights coming back. he never stopped and part of it was the passion he had for trying to get some settlements on these devastating wars that were percolating all around the globe. >> he had been a young foreign service officer in vietnam, and wrote a volume of the pentagon papers where he declared a process thatas overtaken by generals pushing for more and more troops. >> sound familiar? >> yeah. and then his last days he was filing secret memos to hillary clinton which i released some of in this book and was torn apart about the same thing and his inability to be heard all those decade later on the same

opinions and he did look like hell and we knew that he was in this losing fight of his life. >> didn't take advice well, though. >> no. >> particularly had to do with a his health. anyway, going back to our subject tonight. i think we have been circling -- circulating around the fact the way we're currently running our foreign policy in a reduced form and a militarized form, has some consequences to come and that has infused some of the questions we're getting from the audience, which is quite a few. so let me start with this one. can you comment on the bombings in yemen and what complicity of the united states is involved? >> yemen is one of the few conflicts that doesn't come up deeply in this book but that is not say it's not one of the most

important or one of the most devastating. the hugh hand tarean situation there is abysmal. the scope of the human suffering there is unthinkable, it and gets extremely little coverage here in the united states, and absolutely, i think, we're complicit and we're turning away. so it's at simple as that. [inaudible] >> thank you. a lot of damage is being done by our conduct at the moment, and the thought or the hope is that some of it can be reversed but what would that take? >> this entire trend, reversing the damage to state department? >> yep. >> you know, i think that cuts both ways.

from a top-down perspective, i think if you have leadership that empowers diplomacy and focuses resources on large-scale diplomat endeavor you can very quickly see results. you need look no further than that course direction ben rhodes talk about in the second obama term, where they put in three years of legwork, wound up with the iran deal, the cuba thaw, the paris climate change accord. those examples. that's a great example of just how fast empowering our diplomats can produce results and there's some great colorful anecdotest about the broken bones along the way, literal broken bones, as they trade to broker some of those deals. now, from a bottom-up perspective, as we look at how do you restore the vitality of that work force, it's harder.

when colin powell talks buzz mortgaging your future, the reason for that is that the ambassadors that should be coming into power now aren't there and even more so, the ambassadors that should be coming into power 20 years from now that need to be the best and the brightest to address our greatest challenges, are just not there, and they're not going to be there, and you can't restore that work force and that pool of talent overnight. that's going to take years and years and a real culture shift, but my response to that is not to throw in the towel. that just means we need to act all the more urgently because if we don't start now, we're in a real, real bind. >> we mentioned it's kind of perhaps more pronounced in the

trump years, but the. balance that's been created between the state department, the fund available to it, the other capable and resources it has in the military, has green over a number of decades. so is this something that is inherent in our culture and in our -- what we want as a people? and something we have to learn to live with, more militarized approach of the world. if we request back to the begin of the post world war ii america in the world, the speech that people talk about all the time is the eisenhower warning but a military industrial complex. that came from a general, not from a peacemakerrer. what's your thoughts about if

this is a moment of overextension in the military area that will be brought back into balance, perhaps, maybe after an election or after some very bad turns in the world, persuade us of the need go a diplomatics direction. >> to an extent you'll always have a pentagon that is larger than tea state department and that's okay. think maintaining our military might is a smart strategic move and there's no right-minded person who thinks diplomats should be rung everything. it's about the balance of power. our government is design decided run waiver a delicate balance of power between the branches of government win the executive branch, tchen the agencies, and that is way out of whack. mad lynn albright talks about -- mad lynn albright says, the

pentagon needs to be larger but this is beyond any proportion of where it has to be. and keeps getting worse and worse, she says. >> question about our ambassador to the u.n. what do you think of miss haley's performance and can she continue or will she run into too many obstacles in the white house. >> it's interesting. ed to hick team for the week and focused in on the secretaries of state and didn't end up profiling her for it. maybe she counts herself as fortunate after she read what i said about rex. but she does show up in term's of the vicious spat she had with the rest of the administration. not necessarily animated by her. i don't suggest that. but certainly there were white house sources saying that rex tillerson was letting loose on her in such an inhinged and intense way that the president was alarmed and considered it

sectionist and intervened. you can take -- [laughter] -- you can take after that wait grain. white house sources say a lot of things these days. but i think all of that is partsly a consequence of the fact she has a significant profile and has asserted herself in significant ways and dund have a particularly deep foreign policy background but she certainly has leadership chops, and honestly our climate of foreign policy leadership has become so -- such a desert that anyone who seems not insane is oasis. [laughter] >> so i -- will nikki haley say this? i can't say. i don't mean to wholesale endorse everything she has done the u.n. but i will say that

over the years of tensions between u.s. ambassadors to the u.n. and secretarieses of state, she has been one of the more forceful presences u.s.-u.n. side of that. ... on the projects i work on and i think a lot of that is animated by the fact that i try to work

on projects that people hopefully should care about, whether that survivors who risk everything to speak about sexual violence because they thought it would help the next person to come along or the secretaries of state who are deeply invested regardless of what you think of their tenure in the job in the project of making america safer and increasing our influence around the world. i think that many of those secretaries are troubled by what they see happening now and viewed it as a matter of principle to speak about this and for that i'm grateful i'm also really annoying when i start calling and it don't stop. people hate getting my calls these days. >> that was one of holbrook's tricks. >> be people into submission.

i think i learned it from richard holbrook, the heart-- art of being annoying. we have run out of time very soon, but here's a broad question, a lot of books and magazines and conversations these days about liberalism out of our time that authoritarianism, it its head is raced again. nonprofit organization has counseled that the amount of democracy in the world has been declining year by year over the last 10 years. we have more people like the president of turkey who may have quote been elected, maybe in somewhat electoral kind of the politics, but in the whole deeply authoritarian. how worried should we be that this is not a passing phenomenon, but a growing trend and does

it appear in references to pre-world war ii, pre-world war i? >> i think this is all absolutely waived to the subject of this book. i talk about this more militarized role in the world than it would it looks like in the kind of alliances it leads to. you know, when we have relationships like the one with egypt that you mention, like the one with pakistan where it's general to general and spied to spy. i think that does change the tenure of what we care about in those relationships and as the most powerful nation on earth, we don't know for how much longer, but right now the most powerful nation on earth the way we conduct ourselves with other nations is really important and who we bring to the table on the other side is really important, so i do think

against the backdrop of those alarming figures you mentioned this issue becomes all the more acute and importance and i would also point out in kind of a shadowy backdrop to this whole narrative throughout the book is that no one else is standing on their laurels white-- while we did abandon the ploy see. [inaudible] this is a rising power that's willing to put money into diplomacy and you don't have the situation i was writing about in sudan a decade ago where china was the classic rapacious interloper getting the oil and not caring about the human rights-- now china is in sudan doing shuttles diplomacy and trying to get a flashy political settlement, the work the us was once known for and we are now stepping away from an all over the world i talk to young people who grew up with these

symbols of chinese power and i put the question to all of you, do you feel like the world is a safer more stable place with china's human rights track record is filling no space? >> this is a hell of a good book. [laughter] >> you just like that i resurrected that trope. >> i like it despite that. [laughter] >> do you want to say one more thing, ronin, that you forgot to say the beginning? we are out of time, but we could-- >> other than telling people to buy the book? >> on foreign-policy. >> first of all, he is a terrific writer so that makes it easier to read, secondly it's a wonderful combination of analytic power, which i think you heard tonight and a journalist for

color, for interesting people, for things about the way they live, behave and perform the give you a three-dimensional speaking about the world and i think it's quite obvious from what's going on in the world that this is an extremely well-timed book, right on the mark. thank you all very much and thank you, ronin. >> thank you to jim, one of the legends, decades of great policies. thank you, sir. thank you all for supporting this. it means a lot. [applause]. and he's very handsome. >> thanks very much for coming. [inaudible

conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> sunday night: afterwards, television and radio host bill pratt talks about his book, from the left: a life in the crossfire. interviewed by mona chair and. >> who was one of the most persuasive guests? >> john mccain. >> on what subject? guest: about anything. i admire him because he was such a maverick, which i like. i consider myself a maverick-- maverick. he was also honest and willing to take on his own party. you know, i wrote a book critical about barack obama called "buyer's remorse" i thought there was some things that barack obama let the program-- progressive

side down. >> watch afterwards a sunday night at 9:00 p.m. eastern on c-span2 book tv. >> you are watching new orleans weekend on book tv. next, we visit fokker house books located in jackson square. >> came to new orleans in late 1924 and was staying with of the wife of another writer. when sharon anderson came back home he suggested the apartment were too small so he sent him over here because he knew the man who had rented the house had space and was subletting. he really was thought of