Departures With Robert Amsterdam

As a career foreign service officer, Elizabeth Shackelford was seen as a rising star in the US State Department, a recipient of the Barbara Watson Award for Consular Excellence. But in 2017 she resigned from public service, publishing a stinging indictment of a letter which brought to light the extraordinary mismanagement and strategic drift under then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. In Shackelford's new book, "The Dissent Channel: American Diplomacy in a Dishonest Age," she takes the reader inside the collapse of the U.S. diplomatic effort in South Sudan, which had fallen into a pernicious civil war with Washington left backing a murderous dictator. "The role of diplomacy in our national security toolbox has really been downgraded and diminished in recent years, really over the past 20 years as the military's role has become the primary tool we are using," says Shackelford. "We aren't just ineffective. We're counterproductive." Shackelford says that the picture of the coronavirus pandemic would be entirely