Foreign Service: Five Decades on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy - Hardcover

Jim Dobbins has taken on a remarkable array of complex diplomatic challenges. As his book explains, he has succeeded with an unmatched commitment to the lessons of history, the importance of facts, and the power of analysis. His career demonstrates what's possible when rigor is combined with persistence, and his memoir illuminates the richness of a life dedicated to service.
--Michael Rich, president of the RAND Corporation

It's hard to imagine anyone better than Jim Dobbins to address America's role in shaping a peaceful international order. That often requires helping troubled countries achieve peace, democracy, and prosperity--a task that has often been called nation-building. The phrase and mission have, in recent years, fallen out of favor because of hard cases that Ambassador Dobbins knows intimately from his distinguished career on the frontlines of diplomacy. This compact book tells a big and important story. It has the virtues of narrative verve, authentic personal experience (some literally under fire), and gimlet-eyed judgment on how and when U.S. policies succeed, why they sometimes fail, and why Americans must keep trying.
--Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution and former deputy secretary of state

A truly fascinating tour through the inner policy process in some of the most challenging diplomatic and conflict situations the United States has faced in modern times. Jim Dobbins was there and now deploys his analytical mind to look back. Indispensable.
--Carl Bildt, former prime minister of Sweden

This fascinating, well-written account of Cold War and post-Cold War diplomacy will be of special interest to undergraduate and graduate international relations students, US foreign policy scholars, and especially to persons considering a diplomatic career. This memoir is accessible at all readership levels and is enthusiastically recommended. Highly Recommended.--CHOICE

Critics of the State Department often cite an inability to learn from mistakes. Dobbins, reflecting on his career, laments a refusal to learn from success--in nation-building, coalition warfare, democracy promotion and other lately unpopular ideas.

A lack of persistence, he suggests, is fatal to American efforts: "Insanity [is] doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results; but in diplomacy, if one does not keep trying to solve intractable problems, there is zero chance of success." That is a lesson worth learning.--Harry Kopp, The Foreign Service Journal

"Dobbins's inside stories of policy debates over Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti, the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan are insightful and illuminating."--Survival