The week started with Señor Trumpanzee announcing an expansion of his trade war antics against Brazil, Argentina and France (and its only Wednesday!)-- followed by grandstanding self-destructive nonsense about trade with China that caused domestic and world markets to crash.Bloomberg reporters Derek Wallbank and Jordan Fabian: "Stocks dropped in Europe and U.S. equity futures sold off as Trump’s comments indicated no urgency to reach a deal by Dec. 15, which U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross on Monday called a 'logical deadline.' The Trump administration has threatened to impose tariffs on more Chinese imports starting that day. Those levies would hit American consumer products such as smartphones, toys and childrens’ clothing just before the Christmas holiday... A flurry of U.S. trade moves in the past 24 hours has eroded investor optimism that Trump would ease up on tariffs that have slowed the global economy. Rather than ratcheting down trade tensions, Trump is indicating confidence that his import taxes are good for America... Speaking to reporters on a trip to attend a summit for the 70th anniversary of NATO, Trump suggested that in some ways, it might be better to wait until after the U.S. presidential election next November. 'I like the idea of waiting until after the election for the China deal. But they want to make a deal now and we’ll see whether not the deal is going to be right. It’s got to be right,' he said. 'The China trade deal is dependent on one thing: Do I want to make it? Because we’re doing very well with China right now and we could do even better with the flick of a pen.'"Trump's crude, manipulative attacks on Macron, just before his one-on-one meeting with Macron yesterday, were some kind of boorish justification for his threats to slap a punitive 100% tariff on French champagne, cheese, cosmetics and handbags worth around $2.4 billion. Trump says he's retaliating against a digital services tax he claims hurts Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple. (Italy, Austria and Turkey have the same tax.)Tuesday morning Reuters reported that the EU would retaliate if Trump levied the tariffs against France. Does Putin give Trump bonuses for this kind of behavior?Ivan Krastev, author of The Light That Failed: A Reckoning, penned an OpEd for the New York Times yesterday, Will Europe Ever Trust America Again?. My guess is yes-- as soon as the whole world breathes a collective sigh of relief on November 4, 2020, but Krastev seems less sanguine. He wrote that "Trump has insulted international institutions and abandoned allies from Syria to the Korean Peninsula, policymakers on this side of the Atlantic have found themselves trying to walk a fine line: On the one hand, they want to hedge against Washington turning its back on Europe; on the other, they want to ensure that their hedging doesn’t push the Trump administration even farther away. Consequently, European policies toward the United States have been oscillating between grandstanding about our ability to do everything on our own and panicked pretending that everything is as it used to be. See, for example, when President Emmanuel Macron of France recently proclaimed that NATO was experiencing 'brain death' and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany quickly responded by insisting that 'NATO remains vital to our security.'"
As the leaders of NATO countries meet this week in London, much attention will focus on the disagreements between Mr. Macron and Ms. Merkel. But beneath the surface, a new European consensus on trans-Atlantic relations is emerging and it represents a huge change. Until recently, most European leaders’ hopes were bound up with the outcome of America’s presidential elections. If Mr. Trump were to lose in 2020, they believed, the world would somehow return to normalcy.All of that has changed. While Trump-friendly governments in Europe, like Poland’s and Hungary’s, still follow the polls and cross their fingers that Mr. Trump will get four more years in office, European liberals are giving up hope. It is not that they are no longer passionate about American politics. On the contrary, they religiously follow Congress’s impeachment hearings and pray for Mr. Trump’s defeat. But they have finally started to realize that a proper European Union foreign policy cannot be based on who is in the White House.What explains this shift? It is plausible that European liberals are unconvinced by the foreign policy visions of Democratic hopefuls and detect isolationist tendencies in the party as well. Europeans are still struggling to understand how it was that Barack Obama-- probably the most European-minded American president and one most loved by Europeans-- was also the one least interested in Europe. (At least until Mr. Trump came along.)Europeans are also scared by the prospect of a Cold War-style clash between the United States and China. A recent poll by the European Council on Foreign Relations found that in conflicts between the United States and China, a majority of European voters want to remain neutral, finding a middle way between the superpowers. There’s good reason for this: Europe remains economically tied to China in ways that Washington doesn’t seem to appreciate, as evidenced by the recent spat over the Chinese telecom giant Huawei’s plans to build 5G networks across the Continent.But putting that aside, I believe there is a more fundamental change: European liberals have come to understand that American democracy no longer produces a consensual politics with a predictable foreign policy. The change of the president means not only a new figure in the White House but also, in fact, a new regime. Were the Democrats to triumph in 2020 and a Europe-friendly president to take the helm, there is no guarantee that in 2024 Americans will not elect a president who, like Mr. Trump, will see the European Union as an enemy and will actively try to destabilize relations with Europe.The self-destruction of the American foreign policy consensus was powerfully demonstrated not only during the recent impeachment hearings, which have seen the politicization of policy toward Ukraine, but also by the fact that the specter of Russian subversion did not provoke a bipartisan allergic reaction. When Trump voters were told that President Vladimir Putin of Russia supported their candidate, they started admiring Mr. Putin rather than abandoning Mr. Trump.For the past 70 years, Europeans have known that no matter who occupies the White House, America’s foreign policy and strategic priorities will be consistent. Today, all bets are off. Although most European leaders were appalled by Mr. Macron’s derisive comments about NATO and the United States, many still agree with him that Europe needs more foreign policy independence. They want Europe to develop its own technological capabilities and to develop the capacity for military operations outside of NATO.Could this week’s NATO summit change Europe’s current state of mind when it comes to the future of trans-Atlantic relations? It is easier to hope for than to bet on. In the aftermath of the Cold War, Vice President Dan Quayle promised Europeans that “the future will be better tomorrow.” He was wrong. And Europe’s leaders are coming to realize that the future was actually better yesterday.
With Pompeo about to bail from his job heading the State Department so he can prevent neo-fascist crackpot Kris Kobach from losing the Kansas Senate seat to newly minted Democrat-- another Schumer special, a Republican pretending to be a Democrat-- Barbara Bollier, the completely demoralized and decimated department, is in for more turmoil. When Rex Tillerson became secretary of state in early 2017, he set about slashing the ranks of the State Department, both through attrition and through proposed budget cuts. The first few months of Tillerson’s tenure was marked by an across-the-board hiring freeze and an exodus of senior, high-profile foreign service officers.
When Tillerson was fired by tweet and his successor, Mike Pompeo, vowed to bring the “swagger” back to the State Department, he reversed many of Tillerson’s slash-and-burn policies. Still, foreign service veterans say, the damage was done.What’s more, the attrition continues unabated. Career foreign service officers work long hours in difficult conditions, making less money than they would in the private sector. Often, they are driven by their sense of mission-- say, promoting American values abroad-- but when President Trump began attacking the pillars of American national security and smearing diplomats by name on Twitter, “suddenly,” says one senior foreign service officer who was pushed out on a scheduling technicality, “the equation didn’t make sense anymore.” What had started as a trickle of people leaving at the highest levels-- often, people who were close to retirement-- has turned into a flood of mid-career and junior officers heading for the door. The departure of top talent, people who had decades’ worth of wisdom that could have passed on to people below them, as well as the exodus of mid-level officers who had years to go before their retirements, will continue to resonate for quite a while, says Nicholas Burns, a retired career foreign service officer who is now at the Harvard Kennedy School. “That gap will show up years later,” he told me.“What’s striking is both the decapitation of the State Department and the loss of people who should have been the next leadership of the department,” says the foreign service officer who was forced out. “It’s a hollowing out of the foreign service. You can’t replace those mid-level people easily at the numbers at which they’re losing them. That will take a generation to rebuild.”Previously unpublished data from the AFSA shows that the foreign service is losing people at an alarming clip. In the first two years of Trump’s presidency, nearly half of the State Department’s Career Ministers retired or were pushed out. Another 20 percent of its Minister Counselors, one rank level down, also left.There are no official numbers yet for 2019, but one former career foreign service officer I spoke with offered a telling piece of data that speaks to the unease. Last December, this ex–foreign service officer created a Facebook group aimed at connecting fellow FSOs looking to transition out of the service and into the private sector. In less than a year, this former FSO told me, the group has accumulated over 1,000 members. In the two months since the impeachment inquiry began and Trump started smearing career FSOs like Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch and Jennifer Williams, more foreign service officers have begun looking for an exit. Another 100 FSOs have requested to join the Facebook group since the impeachment proceedings began, the source told me, asking other group members to help them dust off their résumés or meet them for informational interviews.“We’re worried about the effect this can have on recruitment, where people say, ‘Is this what could happen to me?’ ” says Rubin. “People think, ‘I could be subpoenaed, I could be ruined with legal bills, I could end up vilified on TV when all I did was my job.’”This comes on top of American diplomats feeling like the Trump administration has been even more focused on controlling foreign policy than past administrations, pushing foreign service professionals to the side using a variety of methods. “The administration’s strategy is to isolate career people from the policymaking process as much as possible, and where that’s not possible, to stifle dissent through character assassination and to let that have a chilling effect,” says the foreign service officer who was forced out, adding, “God, it makes me want to vomit. Because what country are we talking about?”In fact, recruitment has already fallen off dramatically. Ten years ago, in 2009, about 21,000 people took the test to join the American foreign service. Today, according to AFSA’s analysis of internal State Department data, that number is just over 9,000-- less than half. And that was before the impeachment inquiry began.All of this has created alarming gaps all over the world. Trump was slow to fill diplomatic appointments, and with time a clear preference has emerged for “acting” secretaries and ambassadors who are accountable not to the Senate but to him. According to AFSA, 20 ambassadorships remain unfilled. One-third of foreign service jobs in overseas U.S. embassies and consulates sit empty. The work of filling those jobs has ground to a halt because of impeachment proceedings.There’s a hope that, if Trump doesn’t win re-election, many of the departed foreign service officers will return to the State Department. Elizabeth Warren’s plan for restructuring the State Department includes a provision to lure back diplomats who have left or were pushed out during the Trump years. “The practical reality is it’s hard to bring people back,” says a senior foreign service officer. “There’s a reason they left; they’ve rebuilt their lives. Some proposals, including Warren’s, are not realistic.”Meanwhile, China continues staffing up across the world, including in Africa, where the U.S. has an especially high number of unfilled jobs. According to Australia’s Lowy Institute, which issues an annual Diplomacy Index, China just surpassed the United States in diplomatic muscle. The United States, which for decades after World War II had the highest number of embassies and consulates, has been outpaced by a rising adversary.American diplomatic strength, foreign service veterans say, is further undercut by the high number of political appointees Trump has named to ambassadorships. While many political appointees are quick studies and do a good job of representing American interests abroad-- career FSOs point to Kay Bailey Hutchison, Trump’s ambassador to NATO, as an example of excellence-- many others are woefully unprepared for the job. Unlike career foreign service officers who are often experts in the country in which they are stationed, political nominees are usually top campaign donors and lack the knowledge of either the country to which they’re posted or the diplomatic protocols on which host countries insist. One foreign service officer described a politically appointed ambassador inquiring about the difference between the NSA and CIA.And yet Trump has appointed more political allies to ambassadorships than any other postwar president. According to AFSA, 52 percent of America’s ambassadors are political appointees. This is the highest proportion since AFSA started keeping count in 1960. The last time the number of politically appointed ambassadors was this high was Ronald Reagan’s second term, when the proportion of political ambassadors peaked at 37 percent. “We are concerned that the percentage of political appointees is the highest it’s ever been,” says Rubin, the AFSA president. “This really hurts us overseas to carry out the president’s policy and to defend national security interests.”After all, these political appointees, who are often diplomatic novices, are usually facing off against highly trained, disciplined, professional diplomats from countries like Russia and China, which don’t have any politically appointed ambassadors. “China has only professional, not political appointees, and our ambassadors are not always taken seriously,” says one current foreign service official. “We are very often outmatched and outgunned and frequently outmaneuvered these days.”The political appointees are also usually President Trump’s ideological allies, who see the deep state everywhere. Before Ambassador Johnson called [deputy chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in London, Lewis] Lukens in and fired him, Lukens told me that embassy staffers had heard the ambassador tossing the term “deep state” around, questioning the patriotism of employees he didn’t feel were sufficiently loyal to the president. Lukens was already suspect because, in June 2017, when he was the acting ambassador (Trump still hadn’t named anyone for the job), a terror attack hit London: A man with a knife and a truck mowed down pedestrians on London Bridge, killing eight and injuring 48 more. Trump immediately lashed out at Sadiq Khan, London’s first Muslim mayor, and Lukens used the U.S. Embassy Twitter account to send a message of support to Londoners and their mayor in fairly mild diplomatic language. “I commend the strong leadership of the @MayorofLondon as he leads the city forward after this heinous attack,” Lukens wrote. Breitbart immediately spotted the tweet, and Lukens says he was subjected to several days of virtual abuse.“There’s a higher level of mistrust from political ambassadors of career FSOs than I’ve ever seen in my life,” Lukens told me. “Many of Trump’s political ambassadors have an unfounded belief that government bureaucrats are overwhelmingly Democrats and liberals and working against Trump’s agenda, and that’s just not the case.”It didn’t help that, when Trump attacked then prime minister Theresa May, Lukens also passed along a message to the White House from the highest levels of the British government. “The message was, ‘Can you guys cut it out?’ ” Lukens recalls. “The response from Washington was that, short of taking the president's phone away, we don’t really have anything we can do.”More and more, American diplomats abroad find themselves cleaning up the fallout from the president’s tweets or off-the-cuff remarks. When Trump said he didn’t want any immigrants from “shithole countries,” several ambassadors in Africa were called in by their host countries’ foreign ministries and asked for an official explanation.“We’re punching below our weight and not taken seriously,” says a senior foreign service officer. “We’re getting into squabbles with the host country, which is one thing if it’s Russia and China. It’s another if it’s our allies.”
