If not for Donald Fucking Trump, Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch would have had a long, distinguished and inspiring career serving the United States of America that nevertheless remained practically unknown outside the circles of her work. Perhaps she would have been best known for providing a crucial piece of local knowledge when the embassy in Mogadishu was being evacuated in 1991. Maybe her career highlight would have been working for the Moscow embassy when Boris Yeltsin confronted the remnants of the Soviet parliament in 1993, or later in that same assignment working with an all-star team (including legends of American diplomacy Bill Burns and Thomas Pickering) and having front-row seats for Yeltsin’s comeback re-election and the “loans for shares” scheme that cast the die for so much that followed in Russia. That’s a stint that included a few weeks helping to open America’s first diplomatic presence in Uzbekistan in April 1992. “Our makeshift embassy was in the former Communist Youth League building, where a bust of Lenin still presided in the first floor’s main hall. There was no setback, no wall, not even a Marine guard standing between Embassy Tashkent and the rest of the city. In fact, our small team of Americans took turns sleeping in the embassy to guard our communications equipment.” (p. 76) Any of those precautions would have been helpful when there’s a hostage situation soon after, one that Yovanovitch’s quick thinking keeps from escalating and eventually helps to defuse.

If not for Donald Fucking Trump, the toughest battle that Yovanovitch might have faced in Ukraine was over whether the corrupt government of then–President Kuchma had supplied anti-aircraft weapons to Iraq, and her toughest moment before the US Congress might have been attempts to get her to say the word “genocide” in her confirmation hearings to become ambassador to Armenia in early 2008. (Whether or not the US government should characterize World War I era massacres of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire as genocide was a policy decision to be taken by the president or the Secretary of State. Ambassadors implement policy; they don’t make it. Senators, Yovanovitch writes, “pushed me to break with the president’s policy and say the word ‘genocide.’ It wasn’t going to happen, and everyone knew it. It was pure Kabuki.” (p. 164))

It’s during her time in Armenia that Yovanovitch’s path comes closest to crossing mine. She arrived in Armenia a little more than a month after Russia invaded neighboring Georgia. I arrived in Georgia two weeks before the invasion, and when the Russians came fled to Armenia with three small children in tow, though we soon returned to Tbilisi. One of Yovanovitch’s major tasks in Armenia was facilitating a potential rapprochement between Armenia and Turkey, something that would have transformed the region’s relations and probably have prevented at least one war. Most of the talks took place in Tbilisi, and I was close enough to write about it at the time. As I read through Lessons from the Edge, I figured that I knew people who knew Yovanovitch, and indeed, when I mentioned the book to a friend who had lived in Armenia, they immediately said, “Masha? Oh yeah, she’s awesome.”

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