No small irony that the most successful diplomatic life is one most often lived out of sight. The professional virtues required for effective statecraft rarely take center stage—historical curiosity, analytical temperament, ideologically self-aware, attentiveness to detail, patient negotiator. For this reason, John T. Shaw has put us in his debt with The Education of a Statesman: How Global Leaders Can Repair a Fractured World. Few outside the circles of Washington DC’s diplomatic circles have heard of Swedish Ambassador Jan Eliasson, despite rising through the ranks to be Deputy Secretary General of the UN. Shaw remedies that oversight here, but this is no mere biography. He uses Eliasson’s professional life as both commentary and metaphor—field notes and guiding paradigm—and uses the vocation of statecraft to throw light on one of its finest practitioners. As Shaw shows, our fractured world needs more Eliassons.
