Ambassador Madeleine Albright in 1995, while Holbrooke was on an extended vacation, that drove a change in U.S. policy on the catastrophic war in Bosnia, from passivity and deference to Europe’s priorities and the United Nation’s studied neutrality to an assertion of American leadership with intensive diplomacy backed by NATO’s formidable firepower. And many of our successful friends around the world have grown weary of a sometimes-aggressive leadership style. The partnership with our allies was real in Kosovo, and not just a fig leaf for Washington dictating every outcome.The result of this model was an unqualified success. As Packer himself reports, I wasn’t alone in finding Holbrooke exasperating in the extreme. "True to form, Richard was a fighter to the end," said Clinton. Yes, we need to regain the will we have lost since the Iraq fiasco and the 2008 financial crisis, but the possibilities are still there, whether or not our brilliant biographer can see them. That friendship lasted decades and evolved into a special relationship with Pamela Harriman, through whom he socialized with Washington’s political and media elite, including future Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. | APHolbrooke and Albright worked together on Kosovo, but as that province exploded into violence—when Albanians' demands for equal rights triggered a violent crackdown by Serbian forces controlled by strongman Slobodan Milosevic—she felt a far greater sense of urgency with respect to the use of force and resisted his continual pressures to make diplomatic engagement with Milosevic a higher priority. While a peace agreement and diplomatic solution were given every realistic chance, Milosevic’s clear guilt was not masked in a cloak of constant engagement and theater. This was different than Vietnam in an important way: Afghanistan’s terrorist network had shown on Sept. 11, 2001, what can happen when a far-away conflict comes to America. ""If you can prevent the deaths of people still alive, you're not doing a disservice to those already killed by trying to do so," he said in 1999.Born in New York City on April 24, 1941, Richard Charles Albert Holbrooke had an interest in public service from his early years. Packer shows us this self-regard playing out in Holbrooke’s climb to the top of his profession. By this time the war in Afghanistan, having been ignored by the Bush administration, was in its eighth year and provoking comparisons to the Vietnam conflict during which Holbrooke’s career began. So much for policy differences. He also confronted U.N. anger over unpaid U.S. dues to the world body and persuaded 188 countries to overhaul the United Nations' financing and reduce U.S.
And unfortunately it seems that Packer the biographer has adopted some of the myths of American decline that have been popular in recent years. With the Iraq fiasco still haunting both parties, Afghanistan’s conflict approaching the 20-year mark and President Donald Trump destroying what remains of a domestic consensus on American internationalism, it is imperative to get the diplomatic history right.Too often the picture is not a pretty one. Holbrooke." Packer himself went through his own wringer on the question of U.S. intervention. Calling Holbrooke "a true giant of American foreign policy," Obama paid homage to the veteran diplomat as "a truly unique figure who will be remembered for his tireless diplomacy, love of country, and pursuit of peace." Sure enough, in Afghanistan the Bush administration refused allied support and rejected NATO’s historic offer of help before the war. Is it really true that American diplomacy is no longer capable of greatness?But the second part of his thesis is more assertion than analysis. US Diplomat.