The New York Times reports U.S. diplomacy is floundering, with fully 98 percent of diplomats reporting plummeting workplace morale since the Trump administration took over in January.
“The Foreign Service is in crisis,” said John Dinkelman, president of the American Foreign Service Association, or AFSA. “Damage is being done to America’s diplomatic service that we will be paying for for decades to come.”
An upcoming AFSA report warns that “America’s diplomatic capacity is being decimated from within” as seasoned diplomats are laid off or abandon their government roles. The Times reports findings are consistent with “countless anecdotal complaints from both Foreign Service officers, trained professionals who work in embassies and consulates abroad, and the civil servants who mainly staff the State Department’s headquarters in Washington.”
Likely fueling the dissatisfaction is a sense among current and former U.S. officials that, under Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the department has become more political and less relevant, despite Rubio initially assuring department workers that he valued their expertise and wanted the department to play a greater role in foreign policy.
Surveys show 86 percent of employees say it has become harder to carry out U.S. foreign policy. Just 1 percent reported an improvement.
Diplomats say their years of experience and input are not welcome, especially if they diverge from President Donald Trump’s views.
“They have watched from the sidelines as much of America’s most sensitive diplomacy is conducted not by … Rubio but by Trump insiders such as Steve Witkoff, a real estate mogul with no prior diplomatic experience, and Mr. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, often acting with little or no assistance from career diplomats,” the Times reports.
Just this week, Witkoff and Kushner traveled to Moscow to meet with President Vladimir Putin of Russia after leaked transcripts showed Witkoff coached Putin apparatchik Yuri Ushakov on how to manipulate Trump with flattery.
Until this year, the Times reports the State Department had a strong ethos of nonpartisanship, and “many career officials have blanched at the appointments of relatively inexperienced ideological conservatives to senior positions.” A more politicized workplace has also led diplomats to self-censor their observations and advice, according to Dinkelman. Additionally, orientation training for new workers no longer informs them of the State Department’s “dissent channel,” which was created in 1971 in response to concerns that unwelcome opinions about the disastrous Vietnam War that proved accurate were ignored or suppressed.
“If I’m not telling you everything I know because I fear that you might not like the answer to the question, then what is the value of diplomacy?” Dinkelman said.
Read the New York Times report at this link.