One of the more fascinating — and depressing — features of the Trump administration has been its dismantling of some State Department machinery, cutting staff, and overall decimation of American diplomacy. I’ve followed this process since Trump took office. But I’m not alone. In an article in Foreign Affairs, William, J. Burns — President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, former Deputy Secretary of State, and author of The Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for Its Renewal — sounds the alarm in a piece headlined “The Demolition of U.S. Diplomacy.” Its sub-headline: “Not Since Joe McCarthy Has the State Department Suffered Such a Devastating Blow.
Here are some chunks of it:
In my three and a half decades as a U.S. Foreign Service officer, proudly serving five presidents and ten secretaries of state from both parties, I’ve never seen an attack on diplomacy as damaging, to both the State Department as an institution and our international influence, as the one now underway.
The contemptible mistreatment of Marie Yovanovitch—the ambassador to Ukraine who was dismissed for getting in the way of the president’s scheme to solicit foreign interference in U.S. elections—is just the latest example of President Donald Trump’s dangerous brand of diplomatic malpractice. His is a diplomacy of narcissism, bent on advancing private interests at the expense of our national interests.
Ambassador Yovanovitch is not the first professional diplomat to find herself in political crosshairs in the history of the State Department. Trump is not the first demagogue to bully career personnel. And Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is not the first secretary of state derelict in his duty. But the damage from this assault—coming from within the executive branch itself, after nearly three years of unceasing diplomatic self-sabotage, and at a particularly fragile geopolitical moment—will likely prove to be even more severe to both diplomatic tradecraft and U.S. foreign policy.
Burns calls it “the new McCarthyism”:
Almost 70 years ago, in the early years of the Cold War, Senator Joseph McCarthy conducted a savage campaign against “disloyalty” in the State Department. Partisan investigators, untethered to evidence or ethics, forced out 81 department employees in the first half of the 1950s. Among them was John Paton Davies, Jr., an accomplished China hand. His sin was to foresee the communist victory in the Chinese Civil War. Davies was subjected to nine security and loyalty investigations, none of which substantiated the paranoid accusation that he was a communist sympathizer. Nevertheless, in a moment of profound political cowardice, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles fired him.
Purging Davies and his colleagues was not only wrong but also foolish. The loss of such expertise blinded American diplomacy on China for a generation and had a chilling effect on the department and its morale…
That Senator McCarthy’s chief counsel, Roy Cohn, was also Donald Trump’s lawyer and mentor is one of history’s sad ironies. Trump’s scorched-earth tactics, casual relationship with truth, and contempt for career public service bear more than a passing resemblance to the playbook that Cohn wrote for McCarthy. And when Trump cried out for a “new Roy Cohn” to replace the late original, it was hardly a surprise that former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani appeared—or that he dove into the muck of the Ukraine scandal and agitated for the removal of a career ambassador whose integrity and expertise proved to be an obstruction.
Burns notes that today’s State Department leadership has not learned from this experience and has not stood up to Trump. However, this was written before the seeming parade of diplomats now testifying to Congress and adding more weight to impeachment proceedings. So if push-back has not come from the top, it is coming from the ranks of the State Department where some former and present diplomats and officials are defying Trump’s efforts to keep them from testifying.
He then gets into the process that I’ve watched from the start:
Even before the Ukraine mess, the Trump administration had been waging a war on diplomacy for nearly three years. The White House regularly pushes historic cuts to diplomacy and development spending, which is already 19 times smaller than the defense budget. Career diplomats are sidelined, with only one of 28 assistant secretary-rank positions filled by a Foreign Service officer, and more ambassadorships going to political appointees in this administration than in any in recent history. One-fifth of ambassadorships remain unfilled, including critical posts.
Not coincidentally, applications to join the Foreign Service have declined precipitously, with fewer people taking the entrance exam in 2019 than in more than two decades. The pace of resignations by career professionals is depressing, the pernicious practice of retaliation against individual officers just because they worked on controversial issues in the last administration is damning, and the silence from the department’s leadership is deafening.
According to Burns, the “damage to our influence and reputation may prove to be even longer lasting—and harder to repair.” The reason: if official diplomatic channels are now effectively irrelevant, why would countries feel they must talk to the presidents personal lawyer (and his fixer) Rudy Giuliani? He argues that dictators like this approach.
More importantly, he argues, Trump’s actions “distort diplomatic practice and decapitate the American interest. Because of them, a new Ukrainian administration is all the more exposed to corruption and democratic backsliding, and all the more vulnerable to Russian manipulation and aggression.” And Russian President Vladimir Putin is delighted with how the Ukraine scandal has caused multi-front disruptions.
Burns calls for a renewal or diplomacy which he predicts will be “a long, tough journey” that recent events make even “more arduous now, and even more urgent.”
On a personal note, I got to know many diplomats when I freelanced from Spain, India and Bangladesh for 5 years in the 1970s for papers such as the Chicago Daily News, The Christian Science Monitor and a host of other newspapers throughout the world. I also did some reports for “All Things Considered” on NPR from Madrid. In every single embassy diplomats were highly serious, thoughtful people who weren’t into bumper stick style politics. They carefully analyzed issues. They dealt with seeking solutions and making assessments that would go to fellow professionals at the State Department.
An early sign of how toxic the Trump administration was going to be for the vital diplomacy America has to do and for the State Department came in the form of the administration’s first Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. By the time he had been fired he had already dealt a body blow to the State Department via his slashes to it and overall ineptness which caused damage which could last a generation — and caused some experts to call him one of the worst secretaries of state in American history.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.