THE DISSENT CHANNEL

An American diplomat chronicles the joys and perils of her trade, working in Africa, and the many failures of U.S. foreign policy.

Shackelford may have spent less than a decade as a diplomat with the U.S. Foreign Service, but her tales about practicing diplomacy between the shifting priorities and alignments of the State Department and the White House are powerful—and terrifying—nonetheless. After an initial stint in Warsaw, she got her “dream assignment” in Juba, the capital and largest city in the newly independent Republic of South Sudan. “I wanted to be in Africa,” she writes. “I wanted to experience diplomacy on the front lines. I wanted to help a post-conflict country find stability and prosperity. I was naïve. I was looking for a real challenge, something unique. Juba was it.” Despite her inexperience, Shackelford’s compassion for the locals and dexterity in navigating the complexities of interfactional conflicts earned her pervasive respect—and later garnered the State Department’s highest award for consular work. The primary narrative thread is the bloody civil war between newly elected President Salva Kiir and his former vice president, Riek Machar. The author chronicles her desperate attempts to save civilians while drafting sharply worded cables urging the State Department to investigate war crimes. Between these disconcerting dispatches, Shackelford offers a condensed history of U.S. foreign policy that is nonpartisan but also painfully direct as well as pointed criticisms of the system under which she worked: “Could we have prevented war in 2013? Likely not. But we could have prevented our complicity, and mitigated the scale of suffering by championing our values and condemning human rights violations and anti-democratic actions.” The author also discusses her resignation after submitting a “dissent cable,” the last resort for any diplomat to push back against grievous misdeeds.

An honest accounting by a patriot seeking “a deliberate national discourse on what actually makes America great.”