Foreign Policy Magazine

The Ambassadors: America’s Diplomats on the Front Lines

COUNTLESS BOOKS HAVE PICKED APART how the United States stumbled into its so-called forever wars in the greater Middle East. But nearly all of them focus on either the presidents and their inner circles in Washington who signed off on the conflicts or the military they sent in to fight them.

Paul Richter fills a glaring absence in the. U.S. diplomats represent a small fraction of millions of Americans who have cycled through conflict zones from Iraq to Afghanistan to Syria, but they have played an outsized role in the trenches of U.S. policy: the rare triumphs, the common tragedies, and the muddled, messy stalemates in between.

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