The Diplomats (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 251 simply demonstrates the lack of political will on the part of a superpower to project its military power in world affairs, presumably owing to the absence of active interest groups. Had the United States engaged in encouraging peaceful multilateral negotiations through the auspices ofthe United Nations, as was the case temporarily in bringing together the Soviets as well as Afghan and Pakistani officials in Geneva peace talks, the rationale would be axiomatic. But the American policy decision to escalate military aid to the tune of $3.6 billion to Pakistan only serves to exacerbate the predicament of a superpower that refuses to confront the Soviets directly, yet demands the support of Third World countries for its passive posture toward the expanding Soviet military buildup in Afghanistan. The stupendous arms sales to Pakistan, for instance, are confined by both authors to an examination of Indian-Pakistan regional security rivalry. Perhaps some future book by a geostrategic specialist will resolve the absence of a more direct U.S. role in the upper corridors of Southwest Asia. An analysis of upcoming documents should either elaborate on ulterior superpower motives resulting, at one extreme, in some notion of the Finlandization of the Third World through the sheer military force of the superpowers, or should diagnose the decline of superpower military projection in world affairs relative to that of the emerging nonalignment bloc; unless of course, both explanations fall short of requiring a recurring case in another gray-area conflict zone befitting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Bhargawa and Gupta, both prominent Indian scholars of international affairs, make a substantial contribution to the growing post-Vietnam literature on Soviet conduct in the Third World. One can only hope that such writers will provide a more valuable analysis of how these crucial events unfold by restricting the scope of their geostrategic vision. In doing so, they might set a higher scholarly standard, which might outlast the persistent crisis. It would be sad indeed if recent Soviet deployments of thirty-six Tul6 Badger bombers along with thirty-six Su17 Fitters ground-attack fighters and sixty Su24 Fencers on the Afghan border served only to invite another around of hastily organized books with such catchy titles as "The Afghan Syndrome—Revisited." The Diplomats. By Martin Meyer. New York: Doubleday, 1983. 417 pp. $17.95. Reviewed by Timothy W. Childs, former foreign service officer, currently a professorial lecturer in diplomatic history at SAIS. This book is a curious macédoine of the good, the bad, and the indifferent. Essentially, the work attempts too much, and ultimately succeeds at nothing. It tries to be a history of diplomacy; it tries to analyze the functions, working methods, and procedures of the U.S. Foreign Service and the State Department; it discusses "special cases," the Foreign Agricultural Service of the U.S. Depart- 252 SAIS REVIEW ment of Agriculture, and the Israeli Foreign Ministry (in which the analysis of the former seems irrelevant, and that of the latter propagandistic). The book also shows an obsessive animus toward Saudi Arabia throughout, and, finally, tries to come up with "innovative" solutions to situations that the author perceives as problems. Nevertheless, there are occasional shrewd insights throughout what seemed to this reviewer to be the nuclei of at least five separate books. To specifics: the early chapters combine some quite good points about how diplomats operate today, about sycophancy between junior and senior officers, about the inability of the superpowers to control their client states (U.S.S.R.North Korea; U.S.-Israel). The difficulty of maintaining contact with the Opposition in an authoritarian country is also broached, as is the problem of an ambassador who deliberately misrepresents the facts to his hosts, or even worse, to his own government. Mayer also addresses the importance of the media in Washington (although he does not discuss its desirability). Finally, Mayer turns to the perennial problem of misguided, or just plain bad, reporting. In this connection, Mayer relates one of the few genuinely relevant historical anecdotes with which the book is—alas—otherwise oversupplied: during the Russo-Japanese War, a former Russian military attaché was apparently taxed with having reported that the Japanese...