Richard Holbrooke is the only American diplomat since the Vietnam War to have become a full-throttle celebrity, as likely to appear in the tabloids clutching a woman as putting forward a policy proposal in Foreign Affairs. In his thirst for publicity and enthusiasm for the pantomime of statesmanship, only Holbrooke’s nemesis, Henry Kissinger, compares. Since his death at the age of 69 in 2010, Holbrooke has become the totem of an American foreign policy establishment now fallen into disarray, less for any genuine achievement than for the ideals he represented – above all the notion that American power could be made indistinguishable from the exercise of American virtue.
Holbrooke’s admirers see him as the figure who helped America recover from the Vietnam War and embrace its mission as the ‘indispensable nation’ of the post-Cold War global order. He was, in this limited sense, the anti-Kissinger. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, when some State Department officials were urging that the US scale down its international involvement, Holbrooke led the charge for doubling down on US hegemony. The centrepiece of his career was the war in Bosnia in the early 1990s. The Western press, following Holbrooke’s own script, anointed him peacemaker of the Balkans, the man who granted Nato a second life and managed to strongarm the warring parties to come to terms without the sacrifice of a single American soldier.
‘Richard Holbrooke will not go away,’ Samantha Power, his protégée and Barack Obama’s human rights tsar, said a year after Holbrooke’s death. And indeed he hasn’t. In the wake of Donald Trump’s ascendancy, praise of Holbrooke reached fever pitch among members of the ‘resistance’. Yet this desperation to keep his reputation warm may indicate the American liberal elite’s waning capacity for mythmaking rather than the resuscitation of the ‘liberal international order’.