war on peace the end of diplomacy and the decline of american influence, i m holding page 262 open with my finger. we get a big rip roaring argument about america giving up on diplomacy over time and what made the state department a weak enough institution but by the time trump got there to kill it, rex tillerson was an easy and effective tool for doing that job. this book will make ronan farrell a lots more enemies. nobody comes off great. but it does have a bunch of scoops. we learn, for example, the incredible detail on 262, how rex tillerson handled one particularly timely sensitive part of his job. quote, when the united states initiated strikes on syria, the administration entirely skipped the conventional step of notifying nato allies. tillerson received a flood of calls. an officer in the state department s operations center who spent months connecting tillerson s calls told ronan, quote, when news broke, alarmed
when they wonder where it went and why we had to get rid of it. but mostly it s good because he gets people like, i kid you not, the person connecting rex tillerson s phone calls to talk to them talk to him about what s really happening, and those, of course, are the people who always actually know what s really happening. joining us now is ronan farrell fresh off his pulitzer prize. thank you for having me. this is a big deal, and a big piece of reporting. congratulations. i think an important untold story for a whole variety of reasons. you re writing about a long, long-term trend here about diplomacy getting undercut, foreign service getting undercut, the military taking over everything instead. the one thing i didn t know when i got to the end of the book, do you believe that process is complete? is this essentially an obituary for the state department? it is not. okay. and here s why i think that. administration after administration comes in and short changes diplo
of the whistleblowers who were brave enough to speak say they are hopeful. they feel right now potentially under even mike pompeo, there is a power to reverse course to pull out of the nose dive. we are at this incredible moment. you couldn t have known this when you timed the publication of the book. pompeo s confirmation is likely to be tomorrow. is the expectation at state, from people who are champions of the state department, champions of diplomacy, is the expectation that he s there to kind of finish the job, that he s there to continue this ripping the guts out that tillerson has been engaged in? that is the desperate fear. what we know about mike pompeo s past, he is a skilled politician. he is much more lockstep with the president than rex tillerson was. rex tillerson gleefully, he says now partly due to inexperience, in his book he says that. presided over the cuts to the state department. but he also pushed back on efforts to get out of the iran
deal. he fought with the president. and in the announcement of the choice of pompeo, the president said specifically he s a guy who is on the same wavelength. this is a guy who has matched the president tweet for tweet on every statement about the iran deal. so, there s a lot of fear, but this department decision prattly needs leadership. so, there s also this hope. i feel like reading this, putting it more bluntly, i think there is a question as to whether or not the republican party continues to believe that there ought to be diplomacy, continues to believe there ought to be a department of state. killing it this way is one way to do it. abolishing it will become the pledge for the people running to the right of republican nominees and future primaries. that is the fundamental cultural problem. politics of both parties, i do think there is somewhat more of it of late in the republican party. there are brave men and women serving the country for not a lot of pay in dangerous places,
allies called saying i would like to speak with secretary tillerson. it was sunday afternoon and the office was unoccupied. quote, we were told the secretary had a long weekend. he was going to go home and have dinner with his wife and call it a night. no calls. the operations officer exasperated said, we just bombed syria without telling our allies. you might have to do some phone calls, even from home. that floored me, end quote. ronan farrell s new book is called war on peace, the end of diplomacy and the decline of american influence. it s good in part because ronan knows what he s talking about on this subject. he is a former state department official. it is good in part because he s got a bunch of news scoops. and it s good in part because he s interviewed every living secretary of state and got them all to weigh in on the secretary of state disaster we are living through now that we will have to explain to the next generation