Richard Holbrooke , special U.S envoy to Afghanisitan and Pakistan, talks on the phone before the arrival of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on November 18, 2009 in Kabul, Afghanistan.Richard Holbrooke was trying to talk Joe Biden into making women’s rights a priority in Afghanistan when the vice president lost his temper.
Holbrooke said in the 2010 meeting in the vice president’s office that he wasn’t for sending in troops to enforce women’s rights, just for pushing the issue with the Afghan government as troops departed. The exchange between Holbrooke and Biden appears in George Packer’s stunning new biography of the diplomat,. If you’re of the dozens of people running for president, the book is probably the best guide you can find to navigating a transitional moment in American leadership and foreign policy.
And if you’re thinking about what American foreign policy will look like with a Democratic president,offers a glimpse at an old way that nobody in particular wants to go back to. Seth Moulton, the congressman and former Marine who isa White House campaign and is the toast of the Democratic foreign policy establishment, recalled this year that he had once sought “to rebuild the foreign policy that we had before this administration.
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