Just that alone, the vision of that, gets in the way of diplomacy. It also ties into your overall theme that we’ve essentially militarized our diplomats.

Right. Strikingly, actually, in the last few months, there has been a push to have diplomats engage in arms-sale transactions. This is a formal initiative by the White House. That’s part and parcel with the decimation of the State Department right now. We just don’t have negotiators and peacemakers anymore, and we’re shuffling them out as fast as we can and giving the work that they once did to non–subject matter experts—and honestly, as often as possible, soldiers and spies.

When Trump went to Saudi Arabia, his first foreign trip, which was unusual, the evidence of our great diplomatic relationship was this record-setting arms sale.

In a sense, we have the benefit of historical lessons that we are refusing to learn. A lot of the book is devoted to that. The pattern you see is in the first terms of a lot of these administrations: There is this absence of diplomacy, and then almost invariably, there’s a realization, too late, that you need diplomacy. The quote from Condoleezza Rice was, We realized we needed a few diplomats in the second term. [Bill] Clinton slashed the State Department budget and the USAID budget by 30 percent. That had disastrous results. It’s one of the reasons why we didn’t have adequate diplomatic capacity after 9/11. We closed all these embassies, and we shut down two government agencies that were related to very important foreign policy priorities, and you heard in Barack Obama’s rhetoric a commitment to that idea. I quote him over and over again, talking about how our might is not through our military.

The speech in Egypt.

Sure. A lot of people remember his legacy that way, and I think it’s instructive to realize that even in his administration, there was this phenomenon of the militarization of foreign policy and then an acknowledgement that that had been a mistake.

As you point out, he was as reliant on generals—or almost as reliant—as Trump was. I think he was deferential. I just don’t think he was confident early on.

Very few politicians are confident in the face of the military-industrial complex. It’s viewed as a political win to support our generals in a way that it is not to support our dusty bureaucrats at the State Department. That’s a fundamental misperception. There are huge problems with the State Department. It needs reform, it needs fixing, but this is a job of self-sacrifice. Like our men and women in uniform, they are working very often in the most dangerous places on Earth, but they’re not coming home to ticker-tape parades.

I’m careful in this book not to make it as black-and-white as “Pentagon bad” and “State Department good.” These are both systems that have strengths and are necessary, and I think every sober-minded person says, “We need both.” Probably necessarily, the Pentagon has got to be a good deal larger, but what those people also say is, “This is way out of whack. This is way, way out of proportion, and we just don’t have the capacity left on the civilian side anymore.”

One thing that I see that was made clear in the book is that our very best, or sharpest, or at least most opportunistic generals have seen and sensed that there is this maw, that there is no diplomacy. So they have crafted themselves as not just a general, but a diplomat-general. This is something [David] Petraeus does, and [Defense Secretary James] Mattis as the warrior-monk. This is not to impugn their motives. There’s a lot of what they do, because there is no diplomacy, that we’re relying on the military to do it, but it also could lull the rest of us into a false sense of security—we’re getting our diplomacy from the Army, and the Army is now social workers. As you point out, no, they’re not. They have guns.

Right. It’s a completely different skill set. What you lose when you shuffle off the diplomats is any kind of subject-matter expertise. There’s a chapter in this book about North Korea. That’s been a long-fraught diplomatic journey with a lot of failures along the way but also a lot of institutional knowledge gained. We are not relying on our experts there or anywhere else. The Afghanistan situation, when I was there, is really instructive about this. We had a period of maximum military leverage where what the Pentagon was doing could have catalyzed talks. Now, years later, I think there’s much more acceptance in the foreign policy establishment of the idea that you’re not going to win militarily in Afghanistan. You’ve got to talk to the Taliban. There’s got to be a political settlement, but at the time, it was verboten to even say that. We weren’t allowed to say it publicly. You couldn’t suggest it in meetings. Everything had to be done in secret.

You extracted a Taliban-affiliated guy nicknamed A-Rod. He could be a very useful guy to you, and he turned out to be, but he had to be very careful about publicly associating, or embracing, or even letting it be known that he was affiliated with this operation.

The nexus of the Pentagon and the White House really put the kibosh on numerous attempts to jump-start that process faster. What a lot of the people involved say, in retrospect, is, “We squandered the biggest window of opportunity we had to have a political settlement.” No one is suggesting that Richard Holbrooke could have waltzed in and fixed Afghanistan, but you could have had talks earlier, and you could have maybe saved some lives. It could have had a tangible difference for the current situation in Afghanistan, which is yet more military escalation.

President Trump talked about withholding funding from Pakistan. What will that do other than embolden the Chinese?

The Chinese are nipping at our heels. Actually, I think that the lesson about that the world over is we are ceding this space to China. Because as we are eviscerating our State Department, China is year-on-year spending more and more on diplomacy. There was this stereotype for a long time in American foreign policy of, “China is rapacious, and they don’t give a damn about human rights.” There’s a lot of truth to that, but also what we’re seeing is in places where China was the rapacious interloper who aided and abetted the bad guys, like Sudan for instance, now you’ve got a Chinese special envoy doing shuttle diplomacy and wanting big, splashy PR gains from brokering a political settlement. They are filling our space really fast.