Education of a Statesman

John T. Shaw is a historian, long-time Washington, D.C. journalist, and currently the director of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute in Illinois. His work and books have been featured on C-SPAN’s Book TV, PBS NewsHour and C-SPAN. He has published articles in The Wall Street Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, The Boston Globe, and The American Interest. He has been a contributing writer to the Washington Diplomat magazine for over 25 years and writes the monthly “Better Politics, Smarter Government” column that is distributed to 400 papers in Illinois. Shaw has been a media fellow at the Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and is a member of Biographer’s International, a group devoted to advancing biographical writing. He has given book-related presentations at the U.S. Senate Library, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate, the U.S. Archives, the Hoover Institution, and the German Marshall Fund. As the director of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University, he has extensive contacts in the academic and public policy world. He created and hosts “Understanding Our New World,” on ongoing Zoom series of hour-long conversations with influential and astute people such as Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland; Leon Panetta, former Secretary of Defense and CIA Director; William Burns, current Director of the CIA; Pete Buttigieg, Secretary of Transportation; Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO of New America; and Richard Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations. The discussions have been viewed live by thousands of people, tens of thousands have watched on YouTube, and they are now heard as the SimonCast podcast. Guest have also included five Pulitzer Prize winners, who Shaw is confident will write blurbs for The Education of a Statesman. The Paul Simon Public Policy Institute is a member of the Association for Congressional Centers and his connections with the directors of more than three dozen public policy centers across the country will bring greater attention to this book.

• Acknowledgements Author NoteJan Eliasson ChronologyPart I: Snapshots of StatesmanshipChapter 1: Snapshots of StatesmanshipPart II: Diplomatic LifeChapter 2: Rising Through the RanksChapter 3: Addicted to the United NationsPart III: Episodes in DiplomacyChapter 4: Negotiating for Human Rights Chapter 5: Searching for Peace in HellChapter 6: The Quest for Sustainable DevelopmentChapter 7: The Culture of PreventionPart IV: Lessons LearnedChapter 8: The Sage of StockholmChapter 9: StatesmanshipChapter 10: Fixing the WorldSelected ReadingsAbout the Author

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.