The Art of Diplomacy

Stuart Eizenstat had a remarkable career in public service and law. A native of Atlanta, he came to Washington as a young man to serve as chief White House domestic policy advisor to President Jimmy Carter. Later, under the Clinton Administration, he served as US ambassador to the EU, under secretary of Commerce, under secretary of State, and deputy secretary of Treasury. In a different vein, he was a special representative of the president on Holocaust issues in the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations and negotiated several settlements between European countries and banks and Holocaust survivors and their families. He has published three books prior to the present volume under review.Given his background, Stuart Eizenstat is eminently qualified to write a general book on diplomacy. This is his most academic book. It describes and analyzes several of the most important episodes of US diplomacy in the latter part of the previous century and in the early part of the current one. The Egyptian–Israeli peace, President Carter’s outstanding achievement, the Holocaust negotiations, and the Iraqi and Iranian issues are all described and analyzed in detail.Readers interested in the Middle East will naturally find special interest in the chapters on Iran, the Camp David Accords, Iraq, and Afghanistan. To Eizenstat’s credit, his description and analysis of the Camp David Accords are written with the same academic detachment and hardly reflect his close relationship with President Carter. In the chapter on the Arab–Israeli peace process of the 1990s, Eizenstat criticizes Secretary Christopher’s performance in his role as mediator between Israel and Syria. He describes how “the deposit” given by Rabin to Christopher, namely a hypothetical conditional willingness to withdraw from the Golan in return for an adequate package of peace and security, was misused by the Secretary of State. The result was Rabin’s conclusion that he could not pursue the Syrian track and decided to endorse the Oslo Accords, which he viewed with skepticism. It is tempting to speculate what course the Arab–Israeli peace process would have taken had it been built on a Syrian leg rather than on a Palestinian one.Of special interest is a conclusion that consists of lessons on the art of diplomacy—in fact, a series of recommendations to future US negotiators. These are all useful pieces of advice drawn from rich and successful personal experience. Some of them can be applied with relative ease (such as “choose the right negotiator”). Others would be more difficult to implement like “be creative.” As we know from bitter experience, many negotiators who think they are creative are actually treading on safe and unproductive ground. On the eve of the 2024 US presidential elections, the issue of Washington’s commitment to a major international role is on the minds of many. Would a candidate who opposes multilateralism and upholds an “America first” policy win the presidency or would it be a candidate who believes in America’s role as leader of the free world? Be that as it may, one hopes that the foreign policy team put together by the next president would be composed of individuals of Stuart Eizenstat’s stature who, among other things, would know how to rely on his advice.